The North Wind
by Calenheniel
Summary: [Alternate Ending; Hans x Elsa.] "If they knew you were still alive, they would never stop hunting you," he told her bluntly. "As long as you're here, you're safe from them." Elsa's stare turned hard and bitter at these words; and yet his dark, hollow timbre was as clear as daylight. "You're not fit to be a queen, Elsa. Consider this cell a form of...penitence for your crimes."
1. Part I

**Author's Note:** Wrote this dark little story after falling in love with H x E, and I'm sorry if it depresses you all. Obviously, I don't own _Frozen, _though I wish I did; I hope you enjoy it!

* * *

Her cold hands gripped the bars over the window of her cell, icy tendrils snaking out from her fingers and coating the rusting iron.

_It's her._

She stared blankly out onto the town square, and though much of her purview was blocked by the mourning crowds, she knew what passed through them.

**_Anna._**

The coffin, strewn with whatever flowers had been salvaged from the frostbitten country, was being carried to a stone platform near the front of the masses.

She could just make out the form of the trader she had seen with her sister when they had found her atop the North Mountain just a few days before as one of the pallbearers, though his expression was obscured from her sight.

_I should have come back with you then, Anna._

She wished, futilely, that she could cry publicly along with the other mourners—or that she could cry at all.

_I don't deserve that luxury._

She pried her hands away from the frozen bars and forced herself to look away from the scene, withdrawing back to the hard straw mattress atop her prison cot.

Her eyes found themselves drawn back to the pair of gloves that had been left for her by the small opening in the cell's door two days before, and her gaze narrowed at the memory of receiving them.

_"Don't even bother trying to escape, __**your highness**__."_

He had spoken to her in such a scathing tone that it chilled her just to think upon it, let alone remind herself of why he had said it in the first place. She shut her eyes, hoping that if she kept them closed for long enough, the gloves would be gone by the time she opened them again.

_"You only have yourself to blame for this—she'd be alive now if it weren't for your cruelty towards her."_

Hearing his voice again in her head, her blue eyes snapped open—and found, to her dismay, that the gloves remained in the same place as before.

_I can't do this again._

She remembered saying that to him when he'd offered her the gloves in person with an outstretched hand, her body cowering from them as if they had been dipped in poison.

_"You have to, your highness. It's for your __**own **__**good**__."_

Somehow, he had reminded her of the late King and Queen when he'd said that—reminded her of her years spent in solitude and fear of her own powers, and of herself.

_I thought I had finally escaped from all of that._

She reluctantly leaned over, brushing the edge of the sheepskin gloves; after a moment, she finally grasped them more firmly, placing them tentatively in her lap.

**"Good people of Arendelle!" **a voice thundered from outside, startling her in her seat. She looked back towards the window, desirous to look out of it again.

_"No; you stay where you are."_

The recollection of his voice stopped her in her tracks, and—in spite of the overwhelming impulse to ignore it—she stayed in place, just as he'd ordered her to.

**"Today we gather to mourn the passing of a princess too young and too beautiful for the awful fate which befell her—our dearest Princess Anna, to whom we must all give our blessings so that she may pass safely into the next realm."**

The words cut deeply into her, nearly breaking her determination to stay still.

_Oh, Anna—you didn't deserve this._

She swallowed her urge to cry, squeezing the fabric of her dress tightly in her hands. She didn't dare touch the gloves then, knowing what her power would do to them in that moment.

_"You'll put them on, sooner or later."_

He'd said it with such disdainful certainty—not that she could blame him. She had, after all, caused the death of his fiancé-to-be; she supposed it was understandable that he should hate her now.

_"You'll do it for Anna—and so no one else has to suffer the same fate as her."_

She grit her teeth as the head priest continued his wailing eulogy for Anna outside, wanting, more than anything, to cover her ears and block out the noise of the countless thousands that cried for her departed sister.

_I don't want this. I don't __**want **__this._

The wind howled as she shut her eyes, and the whirling gusts momentarily overwhelmed the sounds coming from the funeral procession.

**"Do you see now what the late Queen Elsa has wrought upon this beautiful kingdom?"**

The wind suddenly came to a standstill, and shocked murmurs ran through the crowds.

_"Late?"_

The voice—now recognisable to her—continued in its plaintive, warning tone, entreating to the public.

**"We must all do what we can now to unite and bring peace to this country again—and to pray that it shall be forgiven by the gods, and that summer will return."**

Her body was stiff from the cold, though she had known that this pronouncement was coming.

_"Yes, your highness—I'll make the announcement __**myself **__at the funeral."_

His emerald green eyes, once bright and full of joy, had been as icy as her own in that moment—the moment when her fate had been decided.

_Why can't you just let me leave?_

Her fingers trembled as they fiddled with the gloves again, though she still couldn't bring herself to put them on.

_"If they knew you were still alive, they would __**never **__stop hunting you. As long as you're here, you're safe from them."_

Her stare turned hard and bitter.

_But not safe from __**myself**__._

His dark, hollow timbre was still as clear as daylight to her.

_"You're not fit to be a queen, Elsa; nor would you be able to survive in that wilderness on your own. Consider this cell a form of . . . __**penitence **__for your crimes."_

She choked on the sobs that caught in her throat, threatening to spill forth; still, she would not allow them to, placing a pale hand to her lips.

_Penitence for my—my __**crimes**__._

It was hard to form the word in her mind, let alone to say it aloud. She grasped the gloves tightly to her chest, and looked desperately up at the grey ceiling of her cell.

_"You will be forgotten, with time; and so, too, will your errors be mended when I rule in your stead, just as Anna had wished before her death."_

She turned the gloves over, one by one, until both faced her palms-up.

_I will be forgotten._

Shaking, she slipped one over her left hand.

_Anna will be fondly remembered._

She paused.

_Hans will rule in my place._

Finally, she slipped on the right glove, and her hands relaxed, ensconced by wool.

**_This is my fate._**


	2. Part II

"You're going to have to eat at **some **point, _your highness_."

She glared up at him with drawn features, and pushed away the plate of food towards the wall, where it joined several other untouched ones. She was three days into it by then, though it had seemed much longer than that.

"Why do you **insist **on addressing me with that title?"

He sighed at her refusal of the food before shrugging, unlocking the door to her cell and allowing himself in.

She frowned upon his entry, as she always did, though this did not deter him from proceeding to lean against the wall in his distinctly unconcerned way.

(It made her wonder, for the hundredth time, at how the formerly winsome, polite husband-to-be of her sister had so quickly become the vituperative snake that now slithered so freely in and out of her quarters.)

"Force of habit, I suppose," he admitted nonchalantly, glancing at the right cuff of his dark green coat. He gestured at it with a slight smirk. "Do you like it? I just got it tailored," he remarked.

Though her stare was harsh, there was the faintest hint of surprise in it.

_That suit . . . it looks so __**familiar**__._

He looked somewhat critically upon the handiwork before continuing. "I have to say, the palace tailors are far better back home, but I suppose it was a difficult job—this being your **father's **previously and all that."

Her glare became a glower, and he observed a trail of ice going down her forearms from beneath her gloved hands.

"Now now, your majesty," he tut-tutted her, waving a single, scolding finger at her from his equally gloved hand. "Remember: you must learn to _control_ your powers in here. Otherwise," he reminded her, raising a judicious eyebrow, "I can't guarantee your safety."

She scowled at him with an impotent rage, her hands curling into fists.

"If you thought I could 'control' this," she began, her voice low with anger, "then why won't you let me try to fix what I've already done?"

He scoffed at the question. "Oh, _please, _your highness," he said sceptically, "do you honestly think there's a way to break whatever spell you've put on this place?" His eyes narrowed. "Besides—how do you know that whatever you do won't just make things _worse?_"

Her expression revealed her self-doubt, but she refused to let him win on that point again. "Spells are made to be broken."

His stare grew cold at the remark.

"_Some_, perhaps," he assented, "but not **this **kind."

He took a seat next to her on the cot, which prompted her to immediately rise from it and stand stiffly by the window.

"You don't know that," she snapped, crossing her arms.

He held back a sigh at her stubbornness, patting a space on the mattress beside him.

"I don't bite, you know."

Her blue eyes were cold as death. "No—you just bark," she returned contemptuously. "And that's **worse**."

He grinned a little at that. "You know me too well already."

She ignored the comment, irritated by the casual way in which he had steered the discussion off-topic yet _again_.

_He has a talent for doing that, it seems._

"Don't try to distract from the issue here," she warned. "Don't act as if you already know there's no way to turn back this winter."

He frowned suddenly, and she was internally grateful to dispel his false charm—if only for a moment.

"I never said anything of the sort," he countered, standing again. "If there _is _a way—and I'm **sure** there is—one thing is for certain," he said slowly, drawing closer to her until they stood mere inches apart. "_You _will have **nothing **to do with it."

Despite the fact that her back was directly facing the window, little chilled her more than the cruel, calculating gaze that held hers so fully.

_He'll never let me leave._

Finally, unable to look at him any longer, she shuddered and turned away towards the window.

_Not while I'm __**alive**__, anyway._

Satisfied that he'd sufficiently chastised her for one day, he walked away from her rigid figure, pausing only when he reached the door.

"You **will **eat, _your highness,_" he told her sternly, "whether by choice or by force—it's up to you."

She didn't look back as he opened the door and swung it loudly shut behind him, though the sound of the key as it turned in the lock made her flinch.

She waited until his footsteps were out of hearing range before glancing back at the place where she had shoved the abandoned trays of food; she wasn't surprised to see all of them gone, save for the one he had brought her that day.

_He must have taken the other ones back with him._

She looked away again, and though her stomach growled at the smell of the fresh dinner, her lips were set in a grim line.

_You're right, Hans._

Slowly, the line spread into a dry, bitter smile.

_It __**is **__up to me. _

* * *

**Author's Note:** Thanks to everyone who has reviewed/favourited/followed the story so far, and I'm sorry in advance for how dark it is; I am immensely grateful for your support!


	3. Part III

She could hear them outside of her cell—the echoes of public disenchantment.

_"King Hans said this winter would come to an end, if we prayed hard enough—so why do these dark days continue?"_

_"Perhaps he was just trying to reassure us … anyway, I'm sure it will end soon."_

_"__**Reassure **__us? Don't be a fool, Fredrik. He only tells us to pray to distract us from the __**truth**__: that neither he, nor anyone else in this land, knows how to lift Queen Elsa's wretched curse."_

She wanted to take some pleasure in the knowledge that the people had begun to question Hans's rule—that they were beginning to realize just how little their own _king _understood.

_But it's __**my **__wretched curse._

The thought shattered any sliver of satisfaction she might have extracted from the exchange outside her window, and she stared out with a face full of regret.

_They're my people, but they're suffering because of __**me**__._

She knew that, beyond the mere grumbles of discontent with the king, there was a general hopelessness settling over the population of Arendelle; many of the old and sick had already died from the persistent cold, and more still were threatened on account of their livelihoods being lost and their crops having died many weeks before.

The pain of knowing that it had all been caused by her own inability to control her temper, however, had by that point settled so deeply within her heart that, at times, she didn't know _what _to feel anymore.

_But I'm sure __**he'll **__remind me, if I ever forget._

She quavered with fury as his image summoned itself in her mind, and it took her everything in her power not to throw off the gloves and burst out of her cell purely out of spite.

_I can't, though._

The only thing she would _allow _herself to do, in fact, was to continue to refuse to eat—though even _that_ had become a feat of extraordinary willpower.

_I have to have at least __**this **__much power over my own body._

She faced the window with renewed determination, and ignored the knock on the door that signalled a fresh plate of food would soon be passed through it.

"The King says you will eat," the guard said roughly, shoving his arm through the slit and presenting the food to her, spilling some of the cabbage soup over the side of the tray in the process.

Her nose wrinkled at the smell as she turned to stare at the tray in distaste.

"And you can inform _your_ _King _that I will do no such thing," she growled back hoarsely, her throat sore.

She touched her neck briefly with her gloved hand, expecting the guard—as he usually did—to withdraw the food again, and wait until the king himself came and delivered it to her in person.

That, at least, had been the routine for the past two weeks.

Instead, he suddenly tossed the tray at her onto the floor with a roar of frustration, and the turned-over soup splashed across her white dress.

"I don't know who you are, or why the King keeps you as well as he does," he began, disgusted, "but you should be _damn well _grateful to 'im for giving you some of the best stock the country has left, day in and day out."

She heard—rather than saw—the pure hatred he felt towards her with his next words.

"He keeps your sheets and clothes clean; he keeps you fed; hell, he even makes me bring in a damn _tub _for you to wash yourself in!" His voice lowered as he continued:

"And yet … you go on not eating, just as well as you please."

She stood in silence, staring at the door as he spoke.

"Well, I've had enough of this," he said finally. "If you don't want to eat, then don't eat. You can **die **in there for all I care."

She heard him walk away with heavy footsteps, and a mutter of "Some _prisoner!_" before he went out of earshot.

When she was sure he'd left for good, she leaned down, staring at the pile of turned over plates and bowls.

**_This _**_is the kingdom's best stock?_

She tentatively removed one of her gloves to touch the thin, watery stuff being passed off as the kingdom's traditional, hearty cabbage soup; she equally laid her hand against the small loaf of cold, stale bread that had been brought to her, rapping the top of it with her knuckles.

_Have I really been so … __**ungrateful**__?_

The loaf turned to ice beneath her fingertips without her even realizing it, the top suddenly becoming freezing to the touch. She quickly slipped the glove back on, though by then, the rest of the previously warm food—the thin soup included—had become frozen solid in much the same manner as the bread.

The sight made her brows furrow in repulsion at her own unfortunate power, and she clutched the responsible hand to her chest, shutting her eyes tightly.

_Please let this nightmare end._

The guard's revulsion for her haunted her as she remained crouched by the door, still leaning over the icy tray.

_"… you should be __**damn well**__ grateful to 'im for giving you some of the best stock the country has left, day in and day out."_

She thought, reluctantly, upon that comment; though her mind was clouded and tired from hunger, she knew that she couldn't deny at least _some _of the claims he had made.

_"He keeps your sheets and clothes clean; he keeps you fed; hell, he even makes me bring in a damn __**tub**__ for you to wash yourself in!"_

As much as she was loathe to admit it, Hans _had _provided her with far more amenities in her cell than she would have ever expected him to, given how transparently power-hungry he had become since she'd first met him.

Which begged the question: why _had _he gone to such lengths to keep her—at the most bare, minimum level acceptable, anyway—**comfortable**?

He certainly hadn't given her the impression that he had wanted to, when he had first imprisoned her in that cell; rather, he had made it _abundantly_ clear to her, on repeated occasions, that living in that tiny cell for the rest of her days was to be her **punishment** for her sins.

_"Some __**prisoner**__."_

She scowled at that last, bitter comment the guard had muttered beneath his breath, and finally stood from her crouched position.

Even _if,_ in retrospect, she could acknowledge that Hans had "kept her well" by comparison to most prisoners she'd heard of in the past, he most certainly did _not_ make her feel any less like one whenever he deigned to visit her cell.

_Not that I deserve any better._

The reminder sent her trudging back to the hard mattress, too exhausted from her self-inflicted sickness to do much else besides lay down and try to sleep away the rest of the day.

_Maybe the gods will finally let me leave this realm, this time._

With that sullen hope, she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, never noticing the dark, wide eyes that watched over her trembling figure.

* * *

A dim glow in the night greeted her eyes when she blearily awoke a few hours later.

_What … what __**is**__ that?_

Her eyelids fluttered open and shut drowsily as she struggled to prop herself up to a sitting position. She rubbed her sunken, dark eyes, wincing in pain at the light near her—which, she began to notice, was only growing brighter.

Before she even had time to process what it was, however, she felt the sting of cold steel beneath her chin.

"Looks like you're finally awake, _Queen Elsa."_

She trembled at the sound of the guard's voice, her frightened blue eyes following the length of the blade up the man's armoured arm until they finally locked with his fiery stare.

"I thought it was suspicious," he murmured coarsely, pushing the blade against her skin just enough to draw a little blood from her neck. "For the King to keep a prisoner so well, in times like these … well, it's pretty _unusual, _to say the least." He paused, scowling, and added: "No wonder he didn't want me finding out who was locked up in here."

Drops of blood fell from her neck onto her light brown gloves, and she stared at the blooming stains with unabashed fear, her eyes searching the man's for some hint of sympathy.

"_Please, _sir," she said piteously, "please—don't do this."

He pressed the sword harder into her skin, making her cry out in pain as the blood flowed more quickly than before from the cut.

"Don't act like you couldn't turn me into a big ol' block of ice right now, if you wanted to," he warned her with a grim smile, eyeing her gloved hands warily. "You move those even an **inch**, and you'll lose more than just your hands."

She swallowed at the threat, knowing it wasn't idle—the burning look of resentment he was shooting her was enough to convince her of that—but she couldn't let herself stay silent, either.

"Aren't you going to kill me anyway?" she countered, ignoring her pain for the moment. "You may as well get it over with, if that's your plan."

He laughed at the remark, and the guttural, rasping sound made her shudder. "You'd like that, wouldn't you?" he mocked her. "Gods know you can't stand being so **finely **looked after for the rest of your miserable life."

She returned his taunt with a scowl, though she strained herself to do so.

"Say what you must!" she exclaimed finally, and pressed herself even further into the blade. "But be quick about it, and finish what you've started!"

He suddenly withdrew the blade, and the loss of its pressure made her stumble forward, her palms pressing against the hard floor below.

The guard held a torch aloft with his other hand over her frail body, illuminating it. "No. Not yet, anyway."

She pressed one of her hands to the cut in her neck, trying to keep herself from losing more blood than she had already, and looked up at him in confusion.

"What do you mean—" She stopped, pausing to catch her breath. "What do you mean, 'not yet'?"

His grin was vulgar. "Well, it wouldn't make sense to just kill you down here without anyone else knowing that you're still alive besides me and the King, now would it?"

Her eyes grew wider. "What—what are you saying?"

He seized her roughly by the arm and dragged her back up onto her feet, ignoring her cry of protest. She kept her hand pressed to the wound, fighting to keep conscious and alert.

His grin turned cold. "What I'm saying, _my Queen, _is this: I'm gonna take you out of this **royal suite **and bring you out into the streets to face the people you condemned to this damned winter," he said slowly, "and then—after they've all gotten one last, long good look at you—I'll let 'em kill you any way they like, and your curse will be as good as lifted."

He watched with cruel glee as a faint terror stole into her light eyes at this pronouncement, and he jerked away her hand that stemmed the blood flow from her neck, allowing it to course down her collar and colour her dress a deep, dark red.

The gesture threw her off-balance again, and she staggered forward, her eyes rolling back into her head; this time, however, she felt her body hit a distinctly soft surface, and a pair of warm arms surround her thin frame.

In the same moment, she thought that she faintly heard a low, agonized grunt of pain; but by then, her vision and hearing had begun to fade, and her hold on reality was quickly slipping away.

Still, when her eyes rolled forward again, they focused just long enough to catch a glimpse of red hair, and—far below that—a large body splayed on the ground, blood pooling around it.


	4. Part IV

**Author's Note**: Thank you all again for the continued interest in this story, and I apologize for the delay in delivering this latest chapter. Please enjoy!

* * *

_"Elsa."_

She smiled faintly at the familiar voice, its dulcet, warm tone comforting her.

_"Anna . . . Anna, is that you?" _she murmured back, and absently she worried that her question had not been heard, since she could hardly make out the sound of her own speech.

A soft giggle was her reply. _"Yes, Elsa, it's me."_

She could just make out the faint outline of her sister's strawberry-blonde covered head, her signature braid laid across her right shoulder. The sun rose behind that fair girl's face and illuminated her figure amongst the other familiar sights in her older sister's bedchambers, unchanged from years past.

Her smile widened at the sight, and she gripped Anna's hand tightly.

_"Oh, Anna; I've had such terrible dreams . . ."_

_"Elsa . . ."_

Her brow furrowed as Anna's voice suddenly changed, and a concerned look cast itself over her normally cheerful features.

_"Elsa."_

She shifted uncomfortably on the bed below at the second repetition of her name, and the picture of Anna by her side became blurry and uneven.

**"Elsa."**

Finally, her eyes opened fully, convinced that she would find her sister there; but as the figure by her side came into clearer focus, her expression dropped.

"You're awake."

It was, without a doubt, Hans's face that hovered over hers, and Hans's face that had shown such a curiously worried look—though, she noticed suddenly, the setting in which she found herself was much changed from before.

Her brows rose in bewilderment, and she instinctively tried to rise from the bed in alarm.

"Don't move," he warned her, though he needn't have; she moaned in pain from the attempt and fell back just as quickly as she had risen.

Even so, her hands automatically moved to her neck, which was wrapped in what felt like a fresh layer of gauze. She touched the material—softly, she had thought—but apparently, not softly enough.

"Don't touch it," he gently pressed her hand, placing it back at her side. "It might start bleeding again if you do."

Her head swam at the thought that _he _should be so concerned for her well-being—and, what's more, that _he _should be looking after her in what appeared to be her parents' former bedroom.

She hazily tried to remember how she had gotten there, pressing a hand to her throbbing temple. To her surprise, she found the hand bare; her head turned to her side, where she found the other equally stripped.

Anxious at this discovery, she pressed it to her chest, and stared at him with blue eyes that struggled to focus.

"How . . . you . . . _why _are you . . ."

She trailed off for a moment as a memory suddenly struck her, the weight of it making her heart drop to her stomach.

"You—you _killed _that guard, didn't you?"

His expression darkened at the question. "I did," he replied bluntly.

When she stared back at him in dull surprise, he frowned. "He would have killed_ you_ if I hadn't stepped in."

She shook her head slightly, though it felt like trying to shift a ton of lead. "No," she said quietly, "he would've let _them_ do it."

He glanced out the window, but his expression was unchanged from before. "Well, whichever way he would've done it is of no concern to _me_," he said firmly. "All that matters is that he doesn't pose a threat anymore."

She raised a quizzical eyebrow, her lips cracking as she spoke.

"Pose a threat to whom? To you? Or to _me?_"

He reddened at the question, but only for a moment. Within seconds his look had grown hard again, and he stood from his seat next to her bed.

"What difference does it make?" he deflected in annoyance, and closed the curtains that had once allowed some daylight to enter the room. "You're _my _prisoner; he had no right to decide your fate."

She turned away from him at that comment, unable to acknowledge it as the truth—not to his face, at least.

_I can't give him that kind of satisfaction._

"Anyway, I have to be off now," he said tersely, his tone suddenly business-like. "You're not to move from this bedroom until I return."

He glanced down at a pot on the dresser by the bed, and her eyes followed his gaze to it. When she realized what it contained, however, her look became immediately obstinate.

"I'm not hungry," she choked out, grimacing.

He clucked at her. "There's no point in continuing your hunger strike, _your highness,_" he drawled as he neared the door. He gestured to the grandfather clock on the other side of the room, and a grey smile briefly touched his lips. "You've been drifting in and out of consciousness for three days, now; I've managed to feed you at _least _four times during that period, so I expect you to _continue_ eating while I'm gone."

Her pale cheeks heated at this revelation, and grew even hotter as he glanced at her ghostly form beneath the bedsheets.

"You've gotten too thin, Elsa; it's not a good look on you."

She nearly growled with displeasure as he finally left the room; had she not been so weak, she was sure she would have hurled the stupid pot right at the door and taken infinite delight out of hearing it shatter into a thousand pieces.

Instead, she simply stared at it, aggravated by the mere _memory _of his parting words.

_Gotten __**thin**__, have I?_

She laid back down on the bed, and was annoyed to find how comfortable it was in comparison to her previous accommodations—not to mention how immediately it relaxed her frazzled, fatigued mind.

_As if I'd let him __**feed **__me._

She didn't want to believe his story, since—like so many other things she had learned about Hans since the start of her imprisonment—it made him sound like a better person than she knew him to be.

Feeding her? Changing her bandages? Cleaning her _wounds?_

The list seemed endless, and when she added those "kind deeds" on to the other privileges he had allowed her over the past few weeks—bathing, daily meals, clean clothes—it made her feel uncertain about her unkind opinion of him.

_Why is he doing this?_

It always came back to that single question, though she felt no closer to answering it then than she had been in the days before the incident with the guard had occurred.

Of course, a number of possible theories had crossed her mind—the prevailing one being that he wanted to find a way to control and harness her powers to further his own ill will—but somehow, they all fell flat in the face of the one that seemed the most bitterly realistic.

_He just wants to keep me here to torment me—to show me how powerless I am, and how easy it was for him to take everything away from me._

That reasoning, however, was tied up with its own, complex set of emotions that she dared not delve into too deeply. Whenever she had in the past, she always returned to the conclusion that she only had herself to blame for all of this. Whatever Hans piled on top of it, she supposed it was his right to do so—and it was her lot, awful as it seemed, to accept things as they were.

_After all, _she thought bitterly, _Anna __**did **__name him ruler in my stead._

As this harsh sense of defeat settled over her once more, she felt herself sink further and further into the plush comforts of the mattress.

She knew that soon, none of it would matter anymore—her cursed powers, this endless winter, Hans's cruel taunts—because sleep was the one plane of existence that granted her any form of peace, and she was stealing away into it as quickly as she could.

Nevertheless, as her eyelids fluttered shut and her lips parted, her breathing slowing, a single, persistent thought began to take hold in her.

_Did he . . . did he call me __**Elsa**__?_


	5. Part V

**Author's Note: **Happy Valentine's Day, dear readers! Please enjoy this early release of the next chapter as a token of my gratitude for following and commenting on this story.

* * *

She wasn't sure how much time had passed since Hans had first brought her to that room; it felt like months, though somehow she doubted that could be the case.

_He doesn't come as often, now._

He had long since stopped badgering her to eat after realizing that she did so only when he was gone, her fuller figure and rosier cheeks being evidence enough that she had given up on starvation. He had also left her to tend to her own wounds and cleaning, once he had judged her well enough to do so.

_It feels strange._

It would have been easy, in the past, for her to rejoice in his absence; after all, he had ensured, with his first few weeks of jabs and veiled threats at her, that she would not miss him should he ever suddenly disappear for good.

_But it's . . . __**different**__ now, somehow. _

She frowned at the thought as she sat by the window, its curtains open only the slightest bit to allow for some form of light to enter the dark room.

_Why should things be different, though?_

Looking out at the capitol, it seemed just as desolate and miserable as ever—the square was barren, long since abandoned by local traders who, like everyone else in the kingdom, had shut themselves indoors for whatever little warmth could be had.

_Things certainly __**look **__just as bad as before._

Wanting to distract herself from the sight, her eyes headed north, and trained themselves upon the mountain she had briefly called home. Her stare tightened with remorse as she remembered her fleeting happiness there, finally free from the harsh judgment of strangers and her own self-hatred.

But as her gaze moved down again from the North Mountain, she could see that her joy there had been as empty as the square below was now—and that, in fact, that little piece of bliss had been won only with the lives of many innocent people.

_Perhaps that guard was right—that I have to __**die**__ in order for this storm to pass._

Such dark thoughts had crossed her mind during many of her dreary, endless days, usually when she was too tired to pretend that she felt any real interest in browsing the many thick tomes in her father's library and too morose to relive the few memories she had of her parents in that room.

**_He_**_ wouldn't let me do it, though._

That was the conclusion she always circled back to, though in truth, she knew that there were many ways in which she could do it without him being able to stop her—especially since his visits during the daylight hours had grown so infrequent.

_But he still comes every night._

She wasn't sure when that particularly perturbing habit of his had started, but she also hadn't said a word as she'd laid in the bed at night, pretending to sleep but sensing his presence all the while. On the few occasions that she _had _wanted to suddenly sit up and tell him to get out, however, she found her body immovable and her tongue stiff in her mouth.

She supposed it was because, in an unexpected way, the knowledge of his nightly visits to the room had somehow obtained the power of staying her morbid ideas, if only briefly. Perhaps it was the idea that he should discover her dead in the night that was too frightening to contemplate; the other explanations, anyway, were too confusing to consider.

_Is that really the only reason I haven't done it?_

No, she thought with a grimace, of course it wasn't.

She was afraid, too.

_I don't want to die._

She hated her selfishness, and resented her cowardice at being unable to do such a simple thing—the Gods knew there were plenty of items around the room that she could have used to aid herself in committing the act—but still, she could not bring herself to do it.

_And who knows if that will really break the curse, anyway?_

She knew it was a feeble excuse to get out of trying, but the notion that not even her own _death _would lift this winter terrified her just as much, if not _more, _than the thought that she might live out the rest of her days in the hollow, dying castle which she had once called home.

_There's no home for me now._

**"You're looking better this afternoon."**

The voice of the man to whom she owed her life—as well as her future—roused her from her dismal musings.

"If you say so," she replied despondently, sending him a flickering glance of acknowledgment. Her eyes glazed over as she looked out the window again. "How much longer do you plan on hiding me in here, Hans?"

His voice sounded tired when he spoke again. "Would you rather be back in that cell, then?"

She whipped her head around to stare at him accusingly, her long, white braid laid against her chest.

"Is this not a cell as well?" she snapped, gesturing to the drawn curtains. "Aside from an actual bed and some books, I fail to see the difference between the two."

His anger was immediate, but she noticed—with some surprise—that he spoke with little of his usual bite.

"Then you are blind, _your highness,_" he said, frowning, "and ungrateful, too."

She laughed suddenly at that word, catching him off guard, and stood from her seat with a stormy look.

"'_Ungrateful'? _Forgive me, _your highness,_" she mocked him in his same tone, "if I am so well-kept under your _gracious _protection as to seem _ungrateful _for it." Her eyes narrowed, and her cynical smile disappeared in an instant. "I'll be sure to keep myself more _humble _in the future."

He regarded her look for a long while—hours, it felt like to her—before he finally sighed, walked over to the bed, and plopped wearily down on top of it.

"I don't have the energy to argue with you about this," he said as her eyes widened. "It's too tiresome."

The response was so contradictory to everything she had come to expect from him that she couldn't help but simply stare at Hans, wondering in silence.

_He __**never**__ gives up like this._

She studied him from afar, looking for any sign that indicated he was close to death—perhaps he was bleeding into the sheets below without her noticing, betrayed by one of the discontented palace guards—since she found it inconceivable, otherwise, that he would declare defeat so easily.

Her eyes finally came to rest on his face, and as they did, she cautiously proceeded towards the bed to get a closer look at it.

_He's gotten thinner._

It was clear, from his drawn, paler cheeks, that even the King of Arendelle was feeling the strain of the country's resources drying up in the face of the harsh winter. She guessed that trying to answer to the demands of thousands of starving and dying people—all while most certainly fending off the many challengers seeking to lay claim to the throne during this time of crisis—had taken a great personal toll on him (though he would never admit as much to her).

_It hasn't been easy for him, either._

She continued staring at his figure—still dressed in her father's suit, she noted—before her brows finally knitted in irritation at the situation.

"Do you have some reason for visiting me during the waking hours of the day?" she asked with a wrinkled nose. "Or do you just intend to remain here as a nuisance?"

His green eyes snapped open at the query, and they looked at her with consternation.

"What do you mean, 'waking hours'?" he responded, his muscles tensing.

She returned his bemusement with her own. "You haven't visited this room during the day in over a week, yet you come every night to watch me as I sleep," she explained as if the answer were obvious. She paused for a moment as she regarded his wide-eyed stare, and finally, she added:

"Why is that?"

The same blush that she had seen only once before came back, though it stained the whole of his face then—not _just _his cheeks—and it seemed to stun him into an uncharacteristic silence.

The expression took her aback, but not enough to put a stop to her questions, which suddenly flowed out of her in a swift, unyielding stream.

"And why—why won't you move me back to the prison, even though I am fit and healthy again? Why do you insist that I am well-fed, and bathed, and have clean clothes? How do you keep me hidden from the servants in the castle? And why do you seem so—"

"Elsa," he cut her off, his voice rising and his countenance flushed, "I think you've said enou—"

"Oh—and that's another thing," she continued, ignoring his warning tone. "Just when did you start calling me _'Elsa,' _**Hans**?" She used his first name for effect, and her heart skipped a beat when she saw the colour of his face darken even more. "Since when are we on such . . . _informal _terms?"

She let that last question linger on the air, and waited with bated breath as he digested her outburst, his colour returning to its normal pallor.

"You're **not** the queen, Elsa," he said suddenly, and quietly—quieter than she thought he was capable of being. "It didn't make sense to go on pretending like you warranted some special title."

Normally, that would have been enough to dissuade her from pressing the matter further, but there was something . . . _unconvincing_ about the reason he gave, and the way in which he had given it.

"I don't believe you," she said bluntly, and crossed her arms. "Try again, Hans."

He reddened at her simple, plain rejection of the explanation.

"There's nothing more to say," he replied quickly, swallowing his discomfort. "And as for those other _questions,_" he continued, "I already told you: you're **my **prisoner, and so I will keep you in whatever condition I see fit."

She watched, vexed, as he finally left the bed and began to walk back to the door again; but before his hand could touch the knob, she strode towards him and grasped hold of his arm with a gloved hand, forcing him to turn and face her again.

"I don't think you would treat a normal prisoner like _this, _Hans," she said thinly, and ignored the openly shocked look on his face as she continued: "You can claim that you're a good and caring man all you like, but I'm certain that if I were just some common thief in the streets, you wouldn't allow me even a _sliver _of what I've been freely given."

His face was as red as before—just as red, and just as stubborn in its refusal to tell her the truth.

"Believe what you will, Elsa," he said, trying to extricate herself from his grip, "I've already told you the truth."

Her grip only tightened on his arm, and even through his thick, woollen coat, she knew that Hans could feel her icy fingers hidden within the glove.

"No, Hans," she said, and her expression became steely in the darkness of the room. "You know what I think?"

His green eyes filled with a vague dread. "I think that all of this—the food, the bed, these clothes, keeping me hidden—I think that all of this _extravagance_ is just your way of making sure that I remember who . . . no, _what_—I really am."

She grew unexpectedly melancholy, and her hand relaxed. "Not a queen, a peasant, a farmer, a merchant, a thief," she continued, her expression darkening. "Not even a _human_, really—just a toy, a **plaything **for the King to do with what he will."

Her look turned desperately sad, and she pushed herself away from him again. "Well, Hans, there's no need for all of this, if that's what you're trying to say; I already understand—"

**"You don't understand at all!"**

She stared in blank silence when he turned on his heel and left the room, slamming the heavy wooden door behind him. As his boots clicked against the tiled floors outside, she took off her gloves, and placed her hands upon her cheeks.

They were burning.


	6. Part VI

If there was one thing she truly missed about her old cell, it was its closeness to the outside world.

At least down in the damp depths of the prison, she had been able to keep up with what was going on in the kingdom, if only through the occasional bits and pieces of hurriedly whispered rumours spoken on the frosty air. She'd had an idea of the people's misfortunes, and their feelings towards King Hans; she'd been able to see their faces, even if obscured by the heavy cloaks they wore around them to keep out the cold.

Up in the royal suite, however, she had little to none of that insight anymore. She now could rely only on the fuzzy observations she could make out from her high window, and—besides that—whatever state the King was in when he visited her chambers.

_And he hasn't done much of that, recently._

Since his eruption at the end of their last real, sustained conversation, his visits had become even scarcer, and the ones he'd previously made in the night stopped completely.

_I guess he really thought that I didn't know about them._

The look on his face had been evidence enough of that, and his shock at her questions and remarks had been palpable.

What had stayed with her the longest, though, had been the image of his crimson face, his expression permanently stained red in her memory.

_He just looked so . . . __**embarrassed**__._

Had it really _just _been embarrassment, though?

As the days drew on and his visits grew fewer—she now received food by an unknown servant in the castle who, forbidden to see her, simply put the tray down by the door and left—she found herself questioning, more and more, her previously-held assumptions about the strange expression he'd worn that day, and how he had shouted so fervently at her.

_"You don't understand at all!"_

His meaning was lost on her even then, as she turned the exclamation over in her mind; still, she recalled the _passion _with which he had spoken with startling clarity.

_And I remember __**my **__reaction._

She slowly took her gloves off, pressing her hands to her cheeks—and again, she felt that same heat as it rose up in her throat and billowed out across her skin.

_What __**is**__ this?_

She roughly shoved the gloves back onto her hands as she contemplated the answer, though her fingers were already too warm, the heat having spread to nearly every inch of her body. She felt them sweat inside the gloves' thick interior, and though it was uncomfortable, she dared not remove them again.

_Whatever it is, I don't like it._

Try as she might to thrust that hot sensation back to wherever it had come from, however, she was unable to stop its constant, fluttering pulse within her—nor was she entirely certain that she wanted to.

* * *

She dreamt that night of purple flowers blooming in the meadows of the mountains near Arendelle, their brilliant colour dazzling under the sunlight.

They were the same flowers that Anna had loved, and had brought her many times when they were children, trying to coax her older sister out of her room.

_Orchids._

The scent was as real to her in the dream as if she were holding a bunch of them under her nose, and she grasped at the flowers in the green fields, gathering them up in her arms lest they disappear.

She found, however, that the further she dug herself into them, the further she felt suffocated by doing so; she coughed suddenly when the pressure on her mouth became too much, lifting herself up from the ground.

_But it's not the ground anymore._

She blearily opened her eyes to discover, to her great disappointment, that the flower bed was gone—and, in fact, that it had never been there at all.

_Dreaming again, it seems._

It was her feather down pillow that she had been stuffing her face into the whole time, and she slapped it away in sudden disgust, irritated that she had been woken from that pleasant respite.

But even as her senses adjusted slowly back to reality, one element of her dream world remained uncannily tangible to her.

_That . . . that __**smell**__._

She lifted herself from the bed, still wearing her nightgown, and followed her nose to the window.

She had left it open the evening before to get some fresh air, just as she always did; and at first glance, there was nothing to suggest that anything had been done to it to cause the sudden change.

But that _smell_ . . .

She peeked cautiously out through the curtains at the scene below, and her eyes widened.

_People. I see __**people **__out there._

After so long spent staring out that window with nothing to look at save the endless ocean of snow and ice, it came as an unimaginable shock to her that suddenly—in the midst of this landscape, much of which remained as frozen as ever—there emerged a great number of people.

They hardly looked better than before—from her perch in the castle, she could see that many were still too thin, unkempt, and exhausted—but there was also a hint of something else in the atmosphere on the streets.

_Something like __**hope**__._

She looked up at the ever-present clouds to find that, for the first time in months, she could detect the sun behind them; and when she looked down again, she saw that some of the snow and ice had melted as well, leaving pools of water in various places and opening up small boat lanes in others.

None of the melting was significant enough to allow for any kind of actual travel or communication with the world outside of Arendelle, of course, but it seemed an immeasurable improvement over the previous circumstances.

_And that smell . . . what __**is **__that smell?_

As her eyes darted around the square, looking for the source of the scent, it filled with more and more people, the realization that the kingdom was—if slowly—returning to normal dawning on them.

She tore her eyes away from the scene in pure resolve, and they began to examine the area closer to her, her nose determining that the source was nearer than she had previously thought.

It was at that exact moment that Hans chose to make his first appearance in many days, opening the door with some fanfare.

"Ah, you're up!"

Her body jolted upright at the sound of his voice, and she promptly shut the window completely, her cheeks pinking as she turned her startled expression towards him.

"Hans, you . . ." she began, but trailed off when she heard him sigh.

"I'm sorry to have been away," he said with a broad smile, drawing closer to her. "Times have been hard, as you know—at least, they _were._"

She noticed, suddenly, that one of his hands was behind his back—and, at the same time, that the same scent she had been so obsessed with finding was stronger than ever.

She looked at him with a mixture of suspicion and confusion. "What do you mean?"

It was then that Hans presented it to her: a small bouquet of wild purple orchids just beginning to bloom, a touch of frost still on their stalks.

She stared at her dream flowers in disbelief, even as he pressed the bundle into her open hands; the scent seemed to fill every corner of her waking mind.

"I . . . I don't understand," she said after a minute, unable to comprehend the sight before her. "How did you . . . how—"

"If I could explain it to you, I would," he interrupted her meandering bafflement, and she looked up at him, her eyes just as large with shock as when he had first revealed the flowers from behind his back. "But I'm afraid that I understand it just as little as anyone else does."

She blinked at the admission, unused to him so openly admitting his ignorance. Nonetheless, her eyes were drawn to his in that moment, and their gazes locked; there was an understanding between them then that neither knew what was happening, and, perhaps, even a kind of acceptance that _not_ knowing was all right.

"Hand me those for a moment?"

She jumped a little when he spoke, but acquiesced to his request, giving him back the flowers with inquiring eyes.

He placed them on a side table near the window before returning to her, and held out his hands—which were curiously bare—to her.

"Give me your hands, Elsa."

She stared at him, perplexed.

"Why?"

He grinned a little, though the expression didn't contain any of its usual harshness.

"Just give me them," he repeated, and, though she remained sceptical of the request, she tentatively placed her gloved hands atop his.

His grin relaxed as he pressed her hands in his, holding them there for a moment; the gesture made her face turn red again.

Her expression fell soon after, however, when she felt her gloves slowly sliding off of her hands. Her heart seized up in her chest and her fingers convulsed in alarm, terrified by the sight of her bare palms being released from the fabric.

**"No!" **she cried suddenly, retracting her hands sharply from his, though the jerky movement merely succeeded in doing what Hans had only just attempted to:

The gloves came completely off.

She clutched her bare hands to her chest, absorbing any of the ice and snow that would have potentially been released by them onto her surroundings.

_What was he __**thinking?**_

When she was sure that nothing had been seriously damaged, she glared reproachfully at him, her hands balled up into tight, throbbing fists against her heart.

"What do you think you're doing?" she asked, glowering at his exasperated expression. "Trying to get yourself _killed?"_

He held back, to her shock, an amused smirk at the serious question; seeing her boiling ire, he tried to answer the charge in a way that wouldn't upset her much more.

"You forget, Elsa," he began, pointing at her pulsing, bare hands, "this isn't the first time I've been around you when you weren't wearing _these_." He held up the discarded gloves in his hand to stress the point. "You controlled it before just fine, if I remember correctly."

She could vaguely recall waking up that first morning in the room to discover that her gloves had been removed by Hans at some point during her period of unconsciousness, and how confused she had been by the revelation.

At the time, though, she had chalked up the lack of sudden, raging ice storms following this discovery to her utterly weak state of mind and body, and his willingness to treat her without the gloves being on account of his realizing that, too.

But in that moment—with her recovered, at full strength, and with him fully aware of that fact—she simply could not understand why he would even _attempt _to touch her bare hands, nor how he could believe that she would be able to control whatever happened once the gloves were removed.

Hans's expression softened as he regarded hers, so full of fear, doubt, and wariness; he rested her gloves on the table beside the flowers, and gestured once more to the hands she had burrowed so deeply in her bosom.

"Give me your hands," he said again, though with none of the humour from earlier. His voice was gentler then—soothing, even.

She stared back with eyes unchanged. "No," she said firmly.

He was patient. "Just trust me."

She frowned at that.

_Just "trust" you?_

Her eyes narrowed guardedly. "Why should I?"

**"Because I'm not afraid of you."**

She froze, and her lips pressed together, unable to speak.

His green eyes were distressingly honest. "I'm not afraid of you, Elsa."

She swallowed. Somehow, his words didn't seem any more real upon repetition than they had the first time he'd uttered them.

_He's . . . not afraid of me. That's what he said._

Her hands relaxed unconsciously as his remark replayed in her head, and eventually dropped down to her sides—though she was hardly aware of them doing as such.

He smiled a little at her dumbfounded stupor. "Now, will you give me your hands?"

The look she gave him then made him feel as though he had spoken in a foreign language, or, at the very least, that she hadn't heard him at all above the din of her own swirling thoughts.

He felt himself about to sigh when, to his surprise, she held them out to him—two upturned palms coloured brightly red from being pressed against her chest—though, he noticed, the hollow shock in her eyes had not yet abated.

Still, her subconscious response indicated to him that, indeed, she at least trusted him enough to proceed; and, after a moment of considering her limply outstretched hands, he placed the bouquet of orchids back in her bare hands, making sure to clasp them securely around the base so that they would not fall through her fingers.

When she finally came out of her trance long enough to realize what he had done, she looked first at the flowers—and then, slowly, back up at Hans again, her eyes softly marvelling at his features.

The look made him blush again, and he coughed to ease his discomfiture. "I just thought you should feel them without the gloves on," he said quickly, avoiding eye contact. "It's a waste, otherwise."

She felt that warm sensation creep up inside of her again as he looked away from her; and as that warmth reached up to her lips and ears and finally to her round, pale cheeks, the orchids' scent grew almost overbearing in the room.

"Thank you," she said with a smile—her first, genuine smile in so many weeks—and she rubbed her nose against the top of the flowers, awash in that powerful smell.

"Thank you," she whispered again.


	7. Part VII

**Author's Notes: **Thank you all for the lovely comments last chapter; I'm glad you enjoyed the respite from the otherwise unrelenting gloom of this fic. And here's hoping you enjoy this next installment even more . . .!

* * *

He brought her many more bouquets in the days that followed—bouquets filled not just with orchids, but also with blue anemones, fringed pink, and even maple leaves—and each successive bundle looked more alive than the last.

She had even started to run out of places to put them after a week had passed, and so some had been plucked for their petals, or turned into poultices for her baths.

They calmed her spirit to look at them, sometimes for hours on end; they were, in a way, her only living, breathing reminder of her sister, and so she treasured their presence in that room.

_She would have been so happy to see this curse finally lifting._

Indeed, it was obvious to everyone in the kingdom that—for whatever reason—the powers that be had decided to, at long last, put an end to the misery of winter. And though many of the streets and sea-lanes to other lands remained closed off by ice, the melting had proceeded far more quickly than anyone could have imagined, and life was slowly returning.

Hans had even told her in passing that he might finally be able to send word to his father and brothers in the Southern Isles of the change in Arendelle's fortune, though she remained somewhat sceptical that the winter would disappear _that _rapidly.

Even his more frequent visits over the past week had done little to assuage that uncertainty, as minor a feeling as it felt then. She took an odd comfort from his presence now, and his conversation—which, while still small, was far more agreeable than before.

_The flowers don't hurt._

She blushed as she glanced at the pink petals strewn across her pillow; he had left them there during his last visit that morning, giving her a slight grin as he did it.

Still, she knew that even now, his frequent, more cheerful appearances were hiding something grim beneath them.

She had caught glimpses of that from time to time, especially when his expression suddenly went cold or stern during their talks—usually, of course, whenever she tried to ask him questions about politics.

_I suppose the people are still unhappy with him, even now._

Perhaps that wasn't an entirely fair assumption to make, she mused, remembering how easily the public's sentiments could be stirred by _certain _individuals making any one of a number of possible accusations against Hans and trying to undermine his position.

(The Duke of Weselton came most readily to mind, as she'd heard Hans mutter and mispronounce his name on multiple occasions under his breath.)

Even with his bona fide credentials as a public champion in the first few days of the winter, she supposed that the cold season had simply lasted too long—and been too harsh—for most to hold on to the memories of his kindness with conviction.

_It's not so easy for me, either._

Like the people of the kingdom, she felt a certain restlessness about the climactic shift; mostly it had to do with the notion that she should still be locked away in that room while the world returned to its former state, and that her existence would likewise continue to be kept a secret.

_But it's not as if the melting snow will change what I've done._

One look at the orchids gave her a solemn reminder of why she remained in her current place, and why she would likely stay there for a long while yet.

_I wish I could have held you one last time, Anna._

She closed her eyes at that thought, pressing her bare hand against her forehead; she was starting to get used to the feeling of her own skin again, leaving her gloves to the wayside for much of the day.

_I guess I have __**him **__to thank for that._

It made her stomach flutter to remember the line he'd repeated to her, and to recall the feeling of his bare hands against hers as he pressed the flowers into them.

In retrospect, it was clear to her that his fingers had lingered upon hers a few seconds more than had been necessary—and that she hadn't been bothered by him doing so.

_No—I wasn't bothered at all._

She flung herself back onto the bed with none of her usual grace, digging her face deep into the petal-covered pillows.

_Oh, I wish I was!_

"Asleep already, Elsa?"

She wanted to bury her face even deeper, hearing that amused query; instead, she lifted herself from the bed, though the dark rouge in her cheeks had not entirely left yet.

"I was just resting," she said matter-of-factly, observing with some irritation that he was grinning at her. "I wasn't asleep at all."

"Of course," he replied as he leaned against the window-frame, his pose becoming slightly slumped. "I could use some shut-eye myself at the moment," he added with a yawn, not bothering to cover his mouth as he did so.

She frowned a little at his impropriety, though she was too used to it by then to make any kind of reproving remark about it.

She moved to stand opposite him by the window after a minute, watching his fatigued expression curiously.

"You should rest, then," she said finally, taking him by surprise.

He looked entertained by the idea. "What, _here?_"

She reddened and turned away towards the window.

"If you like," she mumbled.

His smile was wide. "What was that, Elsa? I don't think I heard you."

Her heart pounded, and she glared at him, albeit half-heartedly.

"I _said_," she began, enunciating every individual word, "that _you can_ _sleep here, if you like._"

He grinned again in his particularly aggravating—but somehow engaging—manner as he stroked his chin, considering the offer.

"Well, if you put it like _that," _he teased, his grin growing at her petulant frown, "then I really can't refuse."

She rolled her eyes as he chuckled to himself and walked to the bed, sprawling himself across it. He flicked away the petals from the pillows after a minute, giving her a perplexed look.

"I don't know how you can sleep with these everywhere," he remarked, ignoring her annoyance as he cleared the space. "That _smell _is just so …_pungent._" Seeing her peeved, he added: "And _not _in a good way."

She crossed her arms at the judgment, though she offered no pithy comment in return, simply turning away from him again.

The gesture appeared to upset him. "What is it?"

Her frustration with him, though ever-present, diminished at the question—his tone, after all, sounded genuinely concerned (or at least as concerned as she thought Hans could be).

"It's nothing," she answered quickly, though she knew that it wouldn't satisfy him.

He sighed from behind her. "Then obviously it's _something._"

She frowned at the pointed observation, but remained quiet.

_He wouldn't understand, anyway._

"You know, Elsa," he started again, "it's okay to say what's on your mind, from time to time."

She flushed at the comment; even if he said it from a place of wanting to listen to her, it was still difficult for her to trust him with her most private thoughts.

_Especially when I don't even know his._

"There's nothing on my mind," she lied, not wanting to explain the knotted feeling at the bottom of her stomach.

He didn't sigh at her again, to her surprise; neither did he move from the bed as she might have expected him to by then.

"Well, at least _look _at me."

Perhaps it was the force of his voice that turned her head then—or perhaps she really did just want to look at him in that moment, and show him what was on her mind without having to say it aloud—but all the same, their gazes met suddenly, and her cheeks turned redder than his hair.

They stayed that way for a long while, staring at each other. Somehow, it had the effect of calming her down, and when she spoke again, her voice was almost serene.

"It's just … the flowers you bring me," she said softly, touching a bouquet by the window, "they always remind me of—of Anna."

His eyes lost some of their lustre as he looked away.

"Oh," he said simply.

She elaborated after a moment, gesturing to the orchids: "These were her favourite, actually."

His reply seemed laboured. "I see."

She frowned at his apparent dismissiveness, at first; but as she observed his silent, sullen expression, she wondered if she was interpreting his answers in exactly the wrong way.

_He __**did **__love her, after all._

She suddenly wondered if the comment about the flowers—innocent as it seemed—hadn't actually reopened a wound that she _herself _had inflicted upon him, and the notion made her feel a little sick at her own ignorance.

_Of __**course **__he doesn't want to talk about that—not with __**me, **__anyway._

Still, a part of her remained curious as to the exact nature of the gloomy look that had taken told of him, and in spite of her best instincts, she continued.

"Hans, did—did Anna say anything, before she died?"

His countenance darkened almost immediately.

"I mean, did she—did she say anything about _me?_" she pressed further, ignoring the sudden tension in the air. "About what I did?" Her heart tightened in her chest as she imagined the scenario for the thousandth time. "I couldn't bear it if she—if she said that—"

**"I don't want to talk about this," **Hans said suddenly, cutting her off mid-sentence as he rose from the bed, sweeping his jacket behind him as he made his way to the door again.

She panicked at his sudden exit. "Wait, Hans—I'm sorry, I shouldn't have asked. Please don't go—"

"**Goodbye**, Elsa," he snapped tersely, and left.

* * *

_"Hello, Elsa."_

He spoke in that same, soothing tone as when he'd held out his hands to hers to place the flowers in them, and—just as it had then—she felt utterly enchanted by it.

**"Hans."**

His name was on her lips before she even had time to wonder as to whether it was, indeed, him or yet another apparition conjured by her overly active imagination.

Her eyes strained in the darkness to find him, though she didn't have to look far: he sat beside her on the side of the bed, watching her reorient herself. She sat up and met his stare while rubbing her eyes.

He looked pensive. "I'm sorry about earlier," he said after a while, relaxing slightly. "I shouldn't have lost my temper like that."

She felt as if every day—and, apparently, every _night—_brought with it more and more surprises about the King's true nature, and her jaw hung a little low, unsure of what to say.

He continued in the silence that followed. "I know you meant well," he said softly, and she saw then that his face appeared to be glowing—though, upon closer inspection, she realized that it was nothing more than a trick of the moonlight filtering through the open curtains. "It's just … the memories of her, they're still so—so _fresh, _I suppose."

She reddened at the admission.

_So I was right, after all._

She swallowed her nervousness. "And I'm sorry too," she said at length, her shy gaze meeting his. "I just … sometimes, I don't think before I speak."

He grinned at that, and pressed her cold hand within his gloved palm. "It's a fault we share, it seems."

She couldn't help but smile at the reassurance, though the feeling of his warm, large hand on hers caused all her previous anxiety to return full force.

"Hans, your—your hand," she said after a moment, staring down at it pointedly.

He followed her look and began to draw back, embarrassed. "Ah, sorry—I didn't realize—"

**"Don't apologize."**

He looked up, taken aback by her sudden interjection; and as she suddenly grabbed his hand before it could completely retract to his side, his eyes widened even more.

"Elsa, what are you …" he began, watching hesitantly as she turned his hand over in hers, and with the other gently touched the inside of his palm.

Though her face was red even in that darkness, she looked at him with surprising determination.

"I—I didn't want you to let go," she explained haltingly, her cheeks darkening with each succeeding admission. "I … I just wanted you to—to take your glove off."

After a minute of simply staring at her in surprise—a minute which, in her estimation, seemed to last an age—Hans finally grasped her hand back with a fervour she hadn't anticipated, and smiled nearly from ear to ear.

"You're charming, Elsa; did you know that?" he asked her with pinking cheeks, and she blushed even more horribly than before at the rhetorical question, unconsciously pulling away from him.

He held her fast, and his smile spread into a clever smirk. "Now, Elsa," he said more quietly, his grip relaxing, "if you want this glove gone, you'll have to take it off yourself."

The teasing request was simple enough, she thought; in fact, it was hardly a difficult task at all.

_But it's __**him **__asking it._

Her heart raced as their stares locked in a battle of the wills, and she felt her fingers sweat in his grasp.

_This shouldn't be hard._

She pushed down her apprehension at the playful glint in his eyes, and forced herself to look back down at their entwined hands, her lips pursed in thought.

_Just __**do **__it already, Elsa._

She scowled as she finally pulled off the accessory in one, jerking movement, flinging the glove to the side to express her displeasure with having had to remove it in the first place.

Hans laughed quietly at her tortured expression, and she, in turn, faced him with her fiercest glare; but, after a few seconds, this dark look quickly collapsed, and she sighed at her own weak will.

_So much for trying to look serious._

Her lip twitched at the thought, though she refused to show him a smile at her own expense. Instead, she directed her attention and curiosity back to the original point of interest: the right hand of the Prince of the Southern Isles.

"Any reason you felt the need to take my glove off?" he asked, amused, as she considered the hand in hers. She gave him one sharp glare as her reply, to which he only grinned and sighed.

"Fine, no more questions," he joked.

"Good," she said with the tiniest hint of a satisfied smile, flashing him a fleeting, twinkling blue eye before looking back down at his hand.

_It's strange to see it so up close._

She turned it, bent over to see it more clearly, and became fascinated with his palm; timidly, she traced the lines in it with her other hand, her fingers gently grazing the surface.

She looked up in surprise when he shuddered at this, and she could have sworn that she felt her blood race faster when she realized that he was blushing.

"It just tickles, that's all," he excused himself, though he didn't pull his hand away from her.

She smiled at the comment, finding him, in that moment, strangely … _cute?_

"Sorry," she said, though the apology was more reflexive than genuine; he even smiled when she said it, and the two shared a little laugh.

As their laughter died down, however, Hans's expression grew more serious again, and she regarded the change with some concern.

"Hans …?" she asked, mystified by his sudden intensity. "Is there something wr—"

She froze when she felt his lips on the top of her right hand, the sensation burning against her icy skin. She could feel him nearly draw away as her hand grew colder in surprise at the gesture.

But he smiled then, and—much to her surprise—turned that same hand over and kissed it again, though this time his lips rested upon the inside of her wrist.

She jumped at the sensation, wanting to recoil and remain in place all at once; the latter desire, however, won out, and her heart beat faster than ever in her ears, nearly deafening her.

"I'm sorry to give you such a shock," he said gently, and drew closer to her until their faces were only a foot apart. "But you are too sweet, dear Elsa."

Whatever coldness had numbed her skin before now subsided with that comment, as patently ridiculous as it sounded to her cynical, stony heart, and she wondered at how she could even hear him at all above that awful racket her heart was causing.

_Won't you just __**shut up**__ for a minute, please?_

It calmed down long enough for her to gather her wits and look at him with as staid and cautious an expression as she could muster, though her voice still wavered when she spoke again.

"You—you should be more careful, Hans," she said, and she hated how her voice shook as he continued to plant butterfly kisses along the inside of her hand and across the lengths of each of her fingers. "My power, it—_I_ could hurt you, and …"

A strange sound escaped her throat as his kisses moved down from her hand to the inside of her forearm, his body continually pushing against hers as his kisses grew bolder and drew nearer to her face.

By the time he had reached her shoulder, he was half-kneeling on the bed and his hands were gripping her waist—whether for balance or some other purpose, she was unsure—and she felt as though she were about to drown under him, her legs unconsciously squirming with each successive kiss.

"Hans," she breathed out finally, nearly gasping as his mouth moved along her collar.

When he ignored this, she swallowed, struggling to keep her head above the water.

"_Hans,_" she said again, trying to make it sound more urgent—to make it sound more like she actually _wanted _him to stop.

He nipped at her neck as his other leg drew up onto the mattress, his body now fully hovering over hers.

"Hmm?" he hummed absently against her skin, making her quiver.

She found herself unable to answer to that, almost losing what little of her sense remained as his teeth grazed her earlobe.

_It's too much._

**"Hans!"**

He paused, though his breath was heavy against her ear, making her blush furiously. He drew away a little after a moment, disappointment clearly etched into his features.

"What is it?"

She closed her eyes so she wouldn't have to look at him; still, she felt his bare hands rubbing her sides ever so slowly, lulling her into a kind of daze.

Finally, she said, with laboured breaths:

"I—I'm afraid, Hans."

His hands paused on her sides, and he looked concerned.

"Of me?"

She shook her head slowly, and laid her trembling hands atop his, bringing them together and placing them in her lap.

"Of what I—of what I _feel_," she said slowly, and looked up at him with clear but frightened eyes. "For **you."**

A look of understanding dawned across his lusty gaze, turning it suddenly serious; but she was sure she had seen, if only for a second, that it had briefly gone cold.

Just as soon as she suspected the worst, however, his eyes cleared, and that genuinely charming, affectionate smile returned to his face.

He brought her hands to his lips again, and kissed the tops of her knuckles. "Oh, Elsa," he said in just above a whisper, and brushed her bangs out of her eyes. "You really don't know, do you?"

She stared at him with a kind of wide-eyed innocence, not sure whether she was confused more by the question itself or by the tender, adoring way in which it had been posed.

"What do you mean?" she asked, and gave him a small smile, searching his emerald eyes for an answer.

He sighed as sweetly as ever, and kissed her hand again; somehow, though, the feeling wasn't as comforting as before.

"Elsa," he said her name again in that wondering tone, "ah, Elsa! You foolish, _foolish_ girl …"


	8. Part VIII

A hammering flurry of knocks on the door awoke her suddenly.

**"On the orders of the Duke of Weselton, we command you to open this door ****_immediately!"_**

She shot up out of the bed with a terrified jolt, clawing at the sheets in the dark to orient herself even as the knocking continued, unabated.

**"Whoever you are,"** the voice from behind the door roared again, **"if you do not open this door, we will not hesitate to break it down!"**

Her whole body shook at the crashing of fists against wood, and she desperately pulled on her gloves to steady her thundering heart in her chest.

_What's happening? Who is shouting? __**Where is Hans?**_

The questions were like a circle of bats shrieking at her in that darkness, and she choked back a cry of panic as she crawled onto the ground, gripping a bedpost.

**"We warned you!" **the voice bellowed, and following it soon after was the deafening _crash _of whatever the group behind the door were using to break through it.

Her hands were glued to her ears all the while, trying to block out the noise; though she didn't quite realize it yet, the frozen tears that fell to the ground in a tiny, sputtering hailstorm were evidence of her subconscious understanding of the situation.

_They're coming for me._

As the door finally gave way in a splintering _boom, _she hid her face in her gloved hands, and her body became like ice.

"Queen . . . Queen Elsa? You're **_alive_**_?_"

The question was posed in such a shocked manner that she was forced to finally look up, though she was equally startled by the sudden silence that had descended upon the room.

Still, she could find no words to answer the man—some castle guard at the front of a whole group of them, by the looks of it—nor even to ask questions of her own.

Her chilly, haunted look seemed to deter them from asking anything further; nonetheless, the quietude that had settled in the darkness was soon snuffed out by another voice at the back, which snorted derisively.

"Well, this _is _a surprise," he said snidely, revealing himself to her as the very same Duke of Weselton whose name had been uttered as a means of intimidation not but a few minutes before. "But no matter—this just means that we'll be locking up _two _traitors."

She looked up again at that remark, and her heart pounded with sudden, bewildering terror.

**_Two _**_traitors?_

The first guard stepped in close to the Duke, his expression showing some consternation with the judgment. "But, sir," he protested, "if the traitor King Hans locked her up in here, doesn't that mean that—that perhaps she is innocent?"

The Duke scoffed at the question before waving the man away. "Innocent of _what? _Turning the entire kingdom into an icebox on a whim with her _accursed _power?" He sneered at the guard as the man looked away, embarrassed to have spoken at all. "**No.** I think not."

When her gaze grew hard at this pronouncement, he eyed her for a moment; afterwards, he turned back to the men. "Whatever reason the princeling of the Southern Isles had for keeping the traitor queen here, I don't know—nor, frankly, do I _care _to know," he said bluntly, twitching his moustache. "All that matters now is that she is put back in a proper prison cell where she _belongs, _awaiting what will likely be her **death**."

She would have shuddered once, upon hearing such a firm, unwavering proclamation of her eventual doom; by then, though, she had heard it so many times that it meant practically nothing.

What troubled her more than her own fate, in fact, was the knowledge that Hans had been captured as well—and, by the sounds of it, was already in the prison, having probably been likewise dragged out of his bed in the middle of the night with, no doubt, some dreadful accusations placed on his head by the Duke and his fellow conspirators.

"Seize her and take her down to join the _former _King of Arendelle," he said suddenly, and she went stiff as two guards grabbed her by both of her arms, intending to force her onto her feet.

But no sooner had they had wrapped their bare hands around her skin than they recoiled from her, clutching their arms to their chests.

"Sir, she's like ice!" one shouted to the Duke as he walked away. The older man turned around with narrowed eyes, impatient at the complaint.

"Then throw something over her and carry her **that **way," he snapped, heading off again with most of his retinue of guards.

Only a few stayed behind along with the two that had tried to grab her first, and the others quickly wrapped her in the thick blanket from the bed. The action mitigated the cold radiating off her skin, but only just enough for them to roughly lead her out of the bedroom, nearly pushing her tired body over in the process.

_I'm not ready to go back._

She tried to look back into the room she had been in for so long—to look through that darkness and see the remnants of her parents in the books and paintings, and of Anna in the now-dying flowers all around the bed—but her view was blocked by the guards behind her.

**"Keep your head down,"** one of them barked at her, and she bowed her head with a sudden, unexpected compliance.

_Fine, _she thought bitterly, her eyes glued to the ground. _I'll keep it down. _

She could feel their hands trembling on her even through the heavy blanket, but the sensation gave her no sense of pleasure.

_There's nothing to see if I look up, anyway._

It felt like no time at all had passed when they finally reached the prison, the hallway dimly lit by torches lining it; she winced and looked up again at the light, just barely catching a glimpse of Hans as she was suddenly pushed, sans blanket, into the cell next to his.

It didn't feel real to her until she heard the lock on the door _click, _and even then, in the cold, damp solitude of that awful and familiar place, only one thought caused her entire body to shake uncontrollably.

_I want to see him._

* * *

The trial was over without them ever even needing to appear in court.

It had been done the very next day after their incarceration in a closed-door meeting between the Duke and Hans's former advisers, though—overhearing the short exchange between the guard outside and Hans with regards to their joint "guilty" sentences—it didn't seem as though he had ever particularly trusted the men around him whilst he had been king.

He'd been quiet since the morning of the verdicts, and hadn't even made a sound when the Duke had appeared outside in the main square, publicly announcing them to the shocked faces of the crowd.

_He must still be processing it all._

The accusations against her were exactly what she expected: that she had brought a wintry death upon Arendelle; that she had relinquished her responsibility as Queen and faked her own death; and—worst of all—that she had killed her own sister, Princess Anna.

It had been horrible to hear these read aloud in public when each and every one had plagued her mind for months; all she could do at the time was curl into a ball on the hard plank that served as her "bed" in the cell and wait for it to end, shaking all the while.

The accusations against him, meanwhile, were numerous and questionable: one was that Hans had lied about exchanging wedding vows with Princess Anna in order to become King; another that he had been stockpiling supplies during the worst parts of the long winter in the castle, leaving the public to fend for themselves; and, finally, that several guards had been executed secretly under his authority for questioning his selfish hoarding of said supplies.

The first of these, was, admittedly, hard to know, though the fact that Anna had left Hans in charge was undoubtable, since there had been many witnesses to Anna's declaration; the second seemed equally dubious, since she'd also heard stories of how chivalrous Hans had been when the ice had first set in (although, in all honesty, she couldn't remember the last time she'd heard the voices of many other people inside the castle, let alone partaking in the food and what little other comforts existed inside).

As to the last, however . . . she shuddered at the memory of blood pooling on the hard floor beneath her on that awful night during which she'd nearly lost her own life, and of Hans's cold, calculating look when she'd asked, shocked, if he had really killed that guardsman.

_Still . . . how did __**they**__ find out about that?_

She had never asked Hans about the circumstances following the man's death—whether or not he had kept the murder hidden, or had openly admitted to doing so with the excuse that the guard had disobeyed his direct orders and endangered the life of an inmate—but she supposed that it didn't matter anymore, since the Duke had used the incident to further his own machinations.

_I wonder if they'll turn against him, too._

She thought of the shocked faces of the people, and of all they had been through before this judgment had been piled on top of it; she doubted, somehow, that Weselton could handle the pressure of all the questions and anger that was sure to follow in the days ahead.

On the other hand, she was filled with dread that—even if the public was surprised and upset by the ruling—Hans had never secured his position as king firmly enough to make them revolt against Weselton and his cronies, nor to overturn his—and _her_—death sentences.

_Not that they would try to commute __**mine**__._

She was sure that the same notion had occurred to Hans by then, a full two days after the trial, but she had heard nothing from his cell indicating what he was thinking about anything at all.

_I wish he would say __**something**__._

She had been tempted, more than once, to initiate a conversation of some kind with him. On every occasion, however, she found that she had nothing to say—no words of concern, or encouragement, or anything even close to those.

_Because we share the same, miserable fate._

Her eyes grew gloomy at the thought as glanced at the open grate on the ground connecting their cells, and she wondered, darkly, if she would ever hear his voice again before the end.

**"Elsa."**

She nearly fell off the plank in surprise as her name filtered through the opening.

"Elsa," his voice repeated, sounding weak, "are you awake?"

Her throat felt disgustingly dry as she swallowed down her nervousness, and she crouched down by the grate with wide eyes.

"Yes—I'm awake," she answered timidly, glancing at the door cautiously. She hoped that the guards posted outside couldn't hear them talking.

He sighed a little in relief. "I'm sorry that I—that I was quiet until now," he said slowly, and he, too, seemed aware of the problem posed by the guards. "I just . . . didn't know what to say."

She half-smiled at the remark, and her heart strangely skipped a beat. "I'm relieved to hear you say that," she whispered, "because I felt the same."

He paused, and she wondered if he was smiling, too; the idea that he was made her own smile grow more genuine.

"I was afraid I wouldn't hear your voice again," he admitted quietly, making her blush. "Even though I still don't have much to say, I just . . . _needed _to hear it."

Her cheeks turned a darker shade of red.

_It's as if he's reading my thoughts._

When she was too embarrassed to reply, he continued: "I'm sorry if I made you uncomfortable. Please, Elsa—say something."

Her lip twitched as her face heated at the request, and she took off one glove, pressing her palm to her cheek in a futile attempt to cool it down again.

"There's no need to apologize," she said softly. "You just took me by surprise."

There was a hint of his signature smirk in his reply. "How so?"

She quickly put the glove back on, suddenly feeling self-conscious. "I just—I didn't expect you to say something like that," she admitted.

He chuckled a little. "I suppose I wouldn't, normally," he conceded, "but then . . . there's not much of a point in minding what I say anymore, is there?"

The colour faded from her cheeks at the remark, and she leaned against the wall near the grate, drawing her legs up to her chest.

"No. I suppose there isn't."

It was quiet again for a while after that, neither knowing how to fill the silence in a way that didn't remind them of their unfortunate circumstances.

At length, she heard him clear his equally dry throat to speak again, and her ears perked up in curiosity.

"Did they even give you a change of clothes, after dragging you out of bed?"

The query was so far out of the realm of possible things that she thought he might say in that moment—and, really, quite random, considering all the other things he _should _have been worrying about then—that she had to stifle her laughter.

"What?" he pressed her, obviously intrigued by the muffled sound.

She wiped away a small tear of amusement from the corner of her eye. "Nothing," she said with a smile. "And no—I'm still in my nightgown." She paused for a moment, and her brow rose in interest. "Why do you ask?"

She wondered if he was blushing on the other side. "I didn't think they had, since I haven't gotten to change, either."

She reflected on the comment, reddening.

_What __**does **__he even wear to bed, anyway?_

"It's a white nightshirt and cloth pants," he said suddenly, catching her off-guard, "in case you were wondering."

She crimsoned further, annoyed at how well he seemed to know her thoughts.

_It's not as if I really __**wanted **__to know._

"Did I embarrass you again?" he asked coyly.

She turned her head slightly away from the grate, blushing harder.

"No," she denied stubbornly.

He sighed again, but this time it was a sigh of fondness. "I don't mind, you know," he told her. "It's a natural thing to wonder about when you can't see the person you're talking to."

His comment, meant as a reassurance, only served to remind her of the thick wall that divided them.

She frowned morosely. "I wasn't curious about it in the first place."

She knew that if she could see him then, a particularly self-satisfied smirk would be planted on his rosy lips.

"Of course you weren't," he said knowingly.

**"Oi! You two keep your mouths shut in there, you hear?"**

She recoiled from the voice outside the door, reflexively tucking her knees even more tightly beneath her chin.

_I knew it couldn't last. _

She frowned upon remembering his last words to her.

_Especially not when he keeps talking like __**that**__._

Still, she couldn't help but feel the _tiniest _bit of contentment in knowing that, at least, she wasn't alone in there; and, what's more, that he was willing to distract her with frivolous conversation, even with the spectre of a public hanging looming over their heads.

_I need him now._

A rueful smile spread across her pale lips.

_Maybe he needs me, too._

* * *

**Author's Note: **I was so pleasantly surprised by all the lovely feedback I got on the last installment, so I hope this chapter was not a disappointment for you all by comparison. If things still seem unclear after the ending of Part VII, rest assured that they _will _be more fully explained - and explored - in upcoming chapters.

Also, be sure to check out some amazing fanart for the last scene from Part VII on my Tumblr by the wonderfully talented lisuli79 (link on my profile page)!

Thanks again for your support!


	9. Part IX

"You have _twelve _older brothers?"

"Unfortunately," he replied easily in spite of her disbelief, and snorted a little. "I'm surprised I even remember all of their names, to be perfectly honest—not that it matters," he added grimly, "since I'll likely never see any of them ever again."

She would have laughed at the quip he made, had it not been the preface to such a bitter ending; more to the point, she was still incredulous at the idea of having more than one sibling, let alone _twelve._

Her brows rose, somehow fascinated despite his morbid tone. "It doesn't sound as though you like having so many," she observed quietly.

"That's because I **don't**," he snapped in return; after a moment, however, his tone became apologetic. "Sorry—it's a sore subject."

She couldn't help but feel even _more _intrigued by the matter, now that his irritation with it had been revealed.

"Did something happen to—to make you feel this way?"

He sounded annoyed. "A lot of things _happened, _Elsa," he said tiredly. "It would be impossible to point out just one or two as 'defining moments,' per say."

"Like what, though?" she pressed further, encouraged by the droning sound of the guards' snoring outside their cells. "Surely, it couldn't have been _all _bad."

He scoffed at the assertion.

"Oh, _really? _Well, just thinking of some recent examples, there was the incident a few months ago when Harald—my oldest brother—tried to throw me over the side of his ship because I pointed out that his navigational skills were 'lacking,' to say the _least, _and after that . . ."

Without knowing it, she had set Hans off on a two-hour plus rant charting a lifetime of misdeeds his brothers had committed against him. Most of them seemed par for the course in such a large brood of boys—fist fights, near-fatal duels, ignoring each other, _et cetera_—but others sounded, at least to her, like cruel acts that she would never even _think _to wish upon her own mortal enemies.

Of course, she felt that she wasn't exactly a good judge of what was normal and what wasn't, when it came to siblings and family; considering her nearly non-existent relationship with her late sister, all of Hans's talk of his brothers had the unintended effect of sending her spiralling back into a deep, black hole of dejection.

"Elsa?"

He seemed to have realized, when she hadn't bothered to audibly respond to his stories in over thirty minutes, that she had stopped listening altogether some time ago.

"Elsa? You there?"

A pall of misery had cast itself over her features in the meantime, and she barely heard him even then, while he was trying his best to raise his voice without awakening the guards.

**"Elsa."**

Startled, she finally looked up—only to remember that her name had been spoken from below.

"Sorry," she said, though the word sounded more obligatory than remorseful. "I just . . ."

She stopped, unsure as to whether or not she wanted to continue.

"You just . . . what?"

_You know, Elsa, it's okay to say what's on your mind, from time to time._

She recalled him saying that to her in a recent conversation, though those words already seemed to be from another lifetime.

_Besides—he didn't exactly react well the last time I told him what was "on my mind."_

She frowned at the memory of him storming out of the room that day when she had pressed him about Anna's death; a part of her wondered, though, if he would be more willing to discuss such things now that both of them were cast down into the same, low lot.

"I guess your stories made me think about certain . . . _things,_" she admitted finally, though she was still unable to fully put into words the wild, angry thoughts that filled her guilty conscience. "Things I would rather not like to think about."

He paused, and seemed to consider this answer for a while before he spoke again.

"I understand," he said. "I'm sorry if anything—or, I guess, _everything_ I said—brought up bad memories."

Her eyes widened a little in surprise at this.

_He's been apologizing to me a lot recently, hasn't he?_

She shrugged. "It can't be helped," she said, defeated.

His reply came quicker than she anticipated, and in a gentler tone.

"But then . . . I'm sure you have some good memories, too. Of—" he paused, "—of Anna."

She pressed her gloved hand painfully against her thigh, and rested her forehead against her knees with wincing eyes; as she searched her mind for these memories, however, her posture relaxed a little, and her expression eased.

"I do," she said after a time, "but mostly, they're from when we—when we were children." Her eyes darkened. "But my cur—_I_ spoiled any chance we had of really getting to know each other," she said in just above a whisper. "And I'll never forgive myself for that. **Never.**"

Silence hung in the air.

"But when you were kids, what—I mean," he clarified, "did you at least _play_ together, ever?"

Normally, she would have been agitated at being pushed on a subject which was still too tender to even be addressed in her own mind. However, Hans's strange insistence on it—especially given how reluctant he had previously been to even say Anna's _name _in conversation—piqued her own interest again.

"Sometimes," she spoke austerely, trying to preserve her morose countenance about the topic, "but always without our parents knowing." She grimaced a little, adding: "They would never have allowed it, otherwise."

"Because of your powers?" he asked curiously, though she could detect a note of caution in his tone. He was worried that he might offend her with the question, no doubt.

She nodded to the darkness. "Yes. They were afraid—afraid that I would hurt her without meaning to, since I couldn't control it then."

_Or __**now**__, _she reminded herself sourly, looking down at her gloved hands.

"Is that how . . ." he trailed off, and her brows knitted.

"How what?"

He was hesitant. "How she got that . . . white streak in her hair?"

She swallowed at the pointed observation.

_I suppose it __**was**__ the most obvious explanation, once he found out about my powers._

"Yes," she answered at length, her words thickly laced with regret. "It is."

Her heavy, sorrowful tone seemed to suck the very air out of the cell, not to mention the life out of their conversation; after a few minutes passed in absolute silence (save for the unrelenting snoring of the guards), however, she began to feel guilty for using Hans as a dumping ground for her troubles.

"You are right, though," she cut through the fog of tension that had settled over them with a slight concession of optimism. "It wasn't _all_ bad."

She heard him sigh in relief at the remark. "Nor for me, either," he confessed in a lighter tone. "But you know what they say—it's easier to remember the bad times than the good."

"Yes, I suppose that's true," she said gently. "Still, I shouldn't be so—so . . ."

"Grim?" he supplied, making her laugh a little despite herself.

"I guess I can be," she admitted reluctantly, hiding a smile.

He seemed to hold back a chuckle, just barely. "You _guess?_"

She rolled her eyes. "Fine, I _am _grim_,_" she granted. "Better?"

He finally let out that chuckle, though quietly.

"Better," he agreed.

For the first time, she wished she could see his grin—that infuriating, charming grin—and she wondered how it had come to this.

_You're too sweet, dear Elsa._

She shuddered.

* * *

**Author's Note:** Thanks again for all the reviews, everyone, and apologies for the short length of this installment. The next one has some rather . . . _important _developments in Hans and Elsa's relationship, so I couldn't bring myself to combine it with this one. (Sorry!)

I actually wanted to take a little time here, at the end of the chapter, to explain what might have come across as slightly OOC behavior from Elsa at the start of the last chapter (namely, her _not_ fighting against the Duke's men when they dragged her off back to prison).

Although I can't write _too _much on this point lest I give away any spoilers, generally, I should say that my thinking when it came to that scene was that, in a way, Elsa _has_ learned to control her powers at this point . . . but only in the sense that she redirects all of her stress and fear back onto _herself _rather than others, since she is filled with such self-hatred and guilt about Anna and the eternal winter she set off that she believes she deserves whatever punishment comes her way (even if it came as something of a surprise).

I really just want to get across in this story how devastated Elsa is by what she has done, and how the people around her prey on that guilt to control her. (A depressing angle, I know, but I've just read too many other stories where people help her learn to control her powers through purely love and affection, and, well . . . I figured that's not the _only_ way to do it!)

Cheers until next time!


	10. Part X

**Author's Note: **Another short installment for you all to hold you over until the longer, penultimate chapter. And in reply to a reader question from the last part: the final, italicized sentence was originally spoken by Hans in Part VII, and the repetition of it in the last chapter took place solely in Elsa's mind. Hope that clears things up!

* * *

_Three days._

The thought made her skin run even colder than usual.

_Just three days until we're out there, hanging from the gallows._

She imagined his body hanging limply from the rope, the long drop having broken his neck, and his grey face staring out emptily into the square below.

For some reason, it was easier to imagine _him_ there than herself.

"Don't eat that . . . _garbage _they brought today," he said suddenly, cutting through the silence. "It stinks of rotting meat."

The smell hit her as soon as he'd described it, and she shuddered. Coupled with the gruesome picture her mind had just drawn, it made her feel intensely unwell.

"Just push it towards the far corner of the cell," he instructed her softly, as if sensing her disgust. "It doesn't get rid of the smell completely, but . . . it's better than nothing."

She stood shakily to her feet and covered her nose and mouth as she made her way to the tray of food. Seeing the raw piece of meat—flies swarming around it and white spots of mold growing in various places upon its surface—made her feel even worse.

Still, she did as he'd suggested, pushing it with her foot until it was safely tucked into the corner of the cell. Once this was accomplished (and this was no small feat), she returned quickly to the opposite side of the room, sitting down again by the grate.

"Thank you," she said, though she found it difficult to get out even that simple phrase as nausea lingered in her throat.

"The sick feeling should pass soon," he assured her, and she closed her eyes tightly, her skin still pale. "Just breathe as normally as you can until then, all right?"

She nodded even though she knew he couldn't see the gesture, and she tried to follow his instructions, her lips trembling as she steadied her breathing.

_In. Out. In . . . and out again._

It probably took her longer, she mused, than it had taken Hans; but all the same, after fifteen minutes of repeating this simple exercise, she managed to calm herself down again, and her face returned to a healthier pallor.

_Or maybe I just got used to the stench._

She sniffed the air again, and her nose wrinkled in revulsion.

_No—definitely not._

"You feeling better?" he asked.

She breathed out slowly, and answered: "Yes, I'm better now."

He sounded relieved. "I'm glad to hear that." He added, after a moment: "I was getting worried."

She smiled, though her mouth felt too stifled by the putrid air in the room for it to be genuine.

"I know."

The quiet following this remark was remarkably peaceful; she supposed that, in the four days since their initial imprisonment, they had become accustomed to these long pauses, and even learned to enjoy them somewhat.

_It's not as if we have much of a choice._

It was difficult to find opportunities to speak through the grate, though they tried as often as possible. She was thankful, at least, that the two men who came to watch their cells at night often simply fell asleep at their posts, leaving her and Hans to talk all through the evening and into the early morning hours when the guards finally rotated shifts again.

These clandestine conversations in the darkness had become something of a strange thrill for her, and she awaited nightfall eagerly. Even knowing, all the while, that they were destined for the noose didn't detract from the pleasure she derived out of these discussions.

In some ways, it made them even _more _precious to her as the days leading up to their deaths dwindled away.

It wasn't as though they even spoke of anything particularly significant or interesting, most of the time—rather, they reflected a little upon their childhoods, the books they had read, and art and music they enjoyed. All of them served as effective distractions—or "time-killers," as Anna used to say—from the darkness closing in on them day by day.

_But it's not enough, is it?_

There remained a gnawing sensation at the pit of her stomach, like vines creeping up the walls of the castle, and despite her quiet whispers in the night with him (or perhaps _because _of them), she felt it eat away at her with alarming speed.

Sometimes he picked up on it—her hesitation, her dread, her _terror_—and try as he might to alleviate her distress, she found, time and time again, that his words had little effect.

_Because it's not about what he __**thinks **__it's about._

Nor was the feeling what she _wanted _it to be about: her imminent death; Anna's demise; her parents in their graves; her neck snapping in the coarse rope.

_No; it's not about any of that._

Instead, it was about everything that she didn't want to _think _about, much less allow to _consume_ her from the inside out.

_My feelings for him; not being able to tell him before we go to the gallows; him not knowing when they put the rope around his neck; watching his body twitch as he dies._

She swallowed dryly at the string of unpleasant images, and her lips turned down into a frown, repulsed by her own emotions.

_When did I become this . . . __**weak**__?_

"Elsa."

Her gaze snapped downwards again, though she felt more perturbed than relieved to hear his voice at that exact moment.

"Yes?"

"Just making sure the smell hasn't suffocated you," he joked, though this elicited only an irritated blink from her.

_Poor choice of words, _she thought gloomily.

"I'm fine," she said, perhaps a little too roughly.

"If you say so," he replied sceptically, and then paused in thought. "You just seem so far away, when you go quiet."

_That's because I __**am**__._

She imagined herself back on the North Mountain, ice crystals sparkling in her palms as she constructed her beautiful palace, and held back a trembling breath; but in the next moment it was gone again, and she was back in the cell, facing the grey wall.

"There's nowhere for me to go, Hans," she said bitterly.

He sighed, and she bit her lip to keep from scowling.

_I __**hate **__all this sighing._

"Well, wherever you are," he said, suddenly petulant, "you'll have to come back to reality in three days."

The remark was cold, and it left her feeling sick and angry.

_Why do you have to say such things?_

"Sorry," he said promptly, contritely. "That was uncalled for."

Her face burned at the apology—it was all happening too fast now.

"No—you're right, Hans," she said coolly, glaring at the grate. "I can't just _run off _back to the mountains, now that everyone knows I'm actually _alive_."

There was a hard edge to the comment—an edge directed at _him_.

He was silent for a while as a result, and she was thankful for that.

"**I should've let you go."**

Her heart slowed in her chest until she wondered, absently, if it was beating at all.

"I shouldn't have kept you locked up in here."

Her mouth went drier—if that was even possible, by that point—and her jaw hung uselessly in dull shock.

She could hear him swallow as he continued. "You would have been safe there, in the mountains. You would have been able to take care of yourself." The guilt in his tone was inconceivable to her, but it was there all the same. "I know that, now."

Her eyes were dismally blank at the confession.

_What is he even __**saying**__, right now?_

His words seemed to bounce off her skull without ever actually entering it through her ears; she supposed that the lack of visual confirmation on account of the wall between them didn't help her state of disbelief.

"In fact," he continued, not seeming to care whether or not she was fully processing all of this information, "I've known that for a long time."

She wondered if she looked like the lifeless doll she imagined herself to be in that moment, her back slumped against the wall and her legs splayed out before her haphazardly.

_For a "long time"?_

Her brain sputtered to compute the phrase, to uncover its meaning; but she was no closer to understanding it than she was to regaining the crown and the love of her people.

"This is the part where you tell me you hate me," he remarked after a while, and his self-loathing seemed more real to her than anything he had actually said in the past five minutes (or had it been _hours_?). "And then you take off your gloves, and break out of this hellish place while you still have the chance, never looking back."

Her lips cracked as her teeth set in an uninviting, straight line.

_What are you __**saying**__, Hans?_

"I don't understand," was the only sentence she could muster, her voice coming out as a croak.

He didn't sigh this time, mercifully; nonetheless, what he said brought no clarity to her broken, clouded thoughts.

"You don't deserve to be locked up in this cage, Elsa," he said more slowly, as if that would make her understand him any better. "You should leave, now, while the guards are asleep."

She shook her head, which now ached terribly.

"No," she said quietly. "No, Hans. I can't."

He sounded confused. "Of course you can. Don't be a fool, Elsa."

She winced at that word—_fool_—and her eyes shut tight as she pressed her hands to her forehead, trying to ease the pain stinging behind it.

_Ah, Elsa! You foolish, foolish girl._

She gripped her gown tightly in balled-up fists.

"No, no," she repeated, wanting to muffle the sound of her own voice with the dress fabric. "I can't. I **won't**."

Suddenly, his voice grew angry.

"Stop it, Elsa—**stop it**."

She shook her head again to herself, feeling the beginnings of sobs working themselves up in the pit of her stomach.

_You foolish, __**foolish **__girl._

"Listen to me," he said forcefully, "and do this one thing, Elsa. You **have **to, for your own good."

_You have __to, your highness. It's for your __**own **__**good.**_

She wanted to scream.


	11. Part XI

**Author's Note: **And now comes the second-to-last chapter of _The North Wind_, as promised; thanks again to everyone who has faved, followed, and reviewed the story thus far. This will be my last intrusion at the top, as the last part - Part XII - will be presented without comment.

However, if any of you are interested, I would be willing to do a Q&A chapter following the last part - so if you've been wondering about how I wrote the story, its themes, or my characterisations of Hans and Elsa, please feel free to leave a review including such questions.

* * *

_Sleep_.

It was strange, she thought, how she had gotten so much of it whilst whittling her days away up in her parents' bedroom, since it now escaped her almost entirely.

And it wasn't as if she had so much energy to spare in the first place—in fact, she was _bone_-weary, and needed rest more than anything else.

But every time she felt her eyes finally begin to flutter shut, unable to stay open any longer, something—or some_one_—forced her to awaken again.

That morning it had been a guard reading a message from the Duke with details of the public execution—where, when, what they were and were _not _allowed to do and say—and she had been just conscious enough to make out, albeit fuzzily, his gruff, terse words.

_It's only a few hours away, now._

Night was drawing in around them as her head swayed from side to side, and she wondered, vaguely, when the guards would start snoring.

_Five minutes? No, probably more like ten . . . _

It was the only sound she could rely on to remind her that she was, in fact, still alive, since her talks with Hans had virtually ceased.

Even though she felt as though she had finally come to grips with what he'd said by then, she didn't know how to respond to it—nor how she _should _respond to it.

_I hate him. _

_No—I don't hate him. _

She frowned tiredly at her conflicting thoughts, and brushed a stray bang from her face.

_I hate . . . what?_

Her forehead scrunched in contemplation, and finally, when the answer came to her, she felt a little relieved.

_I hate that he waited so long to say it._

There was a part of her that had innately known, all along, that he had been regretting his decision to lock her in one room or another. That much had become apparent the first time he'd blown up at her, after she'd asked him why he insisted on keeping her in the castle.

_You don't understand at all!_

She _thought_, upon recollection, that the phrase had been tinged with more than a hint of shame; then again, that could have been her exhausted mind manipulating her memories to fit her current image of Hans. Either way, she was sure, now, that he was sincere in his remorse, and in his desire for her to leave.

Still, she couldn't bring herself to tell him that she knew of his guilt—that she'd _known_, in fact—nor could she find the will to speak to him at all in the long days that followed.

_I'm afraid I'll say something I regret._

There—there was the problem, she thought with an acrid look: her inability to be truthful with herself . . . or with anyone else, for that matter.

_I wish I wasn't like this._

She frowned at the piteous thought, her fists clenching.

_"I wish," "I hope," "I'm afraid" . . . __**why**__ am I like this?_

Her lifelong timidity was unnervingly obvious to her then, and she suddenly hated it—hated it more than Hans's poor timing, or anything he'd ever said to her even in his cruellest moments.

Her fingernails dug painfully into her palms through the gloves.

_I can't do this anymore._

The snoring outside startled her, and she wondered how long it had been going without her even realizing it. Her eyes shot over to the grate, and finally—without hesitation—she tucked herself by it, and spoke to him.

"_Hans_," she whispered, not knowing how long the guards had been asleep. "Hans, are you awake?"

A pause, followed by a dark, sullen voice.

"It's hard to sleep the night before your execution."

She pursed her lips to keep them from frowning, and leaned down closer to the opening.

He started again before she could say anything:

"So you're talking to me again, then?"

Her mouth twitched at the question—full of cheek, but tinted with his unhappiness at her silence—and she rested her chin in her palm.

"I considered never doing so again," she admitted, though, to her own surprise, without the retaliatory bite she had wanted to convey.

He was relieved. "I didn't think you would, to be honest." And, after a moment: "Not that I would have blamed you, if you chose not to."

Her eyebrow rose curiously at the comment; he seemed to be covering his tracks after every sentence now, not wanting to upset her in any way. It was a bizarre reversal, considering how eager he had been to offend her at every turn just a month ago.

"On the contrary," he continued, "I was _hoping _you would have taken my advice by now, and I'd have woken up this morning to find a giant, gaping hole where your cell used to be."

She grimaced a little at the image, remembering how she had broken out of a cell in just that same manner before Anna's death—only to have been dragged back again into another one after it.

"I can't do that, Hans," she said, and added quietly: "Not again."

He didn't rebuke her immediately as he had before, but she knew he was frowning at the wall between them.

"Besides," she sought to explain, "it's not as simple as before. Not with _you _here, and—"

She faltered at the last second, her heart thudding in her chest.

_What was I going to say?_

"Elsa?"

She was blushing, but she didn't hate the feeling as much anymore.

_You __**know **__what you were going to say._

Her eyes darkened.

"I can't leave you here to _die_, Hans."

He was silent at that.

It would have scared her before, she mused, that deafening _silence_ of his; but then, she also felt that it gave her room to think, and to _remember._

She pinked, and her gaze lightened.

_You're charming, Elsa; did you know that?_

"I dreamed about you."

The words left her lips in a drawl, and she held back a sigh.

Yes, it had been a dream, that night—that much was clear to her now.

It hurt a little to remember it, in that confined space. She hazily recalled how real it had been at the time, and how she'd nearly convinced herself that it had actually happened—those kisses on her wrist, her arm, her _neck_ . . .

She supposed, in the midst of this fantasy, she had gone numb; for after the Duke and his men broke into her quarters that same night, tearing her from that blissful sleep, she had been too much in shock to even understand what was happening.

_And too __**pitiful**__ to retaliate against them._

Her hand twisted.

_Ah, Elsa! You foolish, __**foolish **__gi—_

"I dreamed about you, too," he said, cutting short her thoughts. "Often," he added suddenly, softly—but there was no embarrassment in this admission.

She reddened; she hadn't expected that last bit.

"I wish I could see your face right now," he teased. "I bet you're blushing."

Her ears were hot. _Too _hot.

"I'm not," she denied.

He chuckled. "Well, if you _are,_" he said affectionately, "I'm sure you look adorable."

She took her gloves off and pressed her face into her hands, feeling them burn to a scarlet colour.

Secretly, though, she was smiling.

"I liked it when you blushed," she blurted out, and promptly dug her mouth back into her palms. "Forget I said anything," she mumbled, mostly to herself.

His voice was _far _too pleased for her liking.

"You did?" he asked, and in spite of his coy tone—which, she supposed, was part and parcel of his unique charm—he _did _sound genuinely curious, too.

She managed to lift her head up from her scorching fingers long enough to reply, though she stumbled all the way through it.

"I thought—I guess I—I thought that I was seeing the _real _you, in those moments." She paused, bringing forth the picture of his pinking cheeks to the front of her mind. "You were never easy to read either, you know."

He laughed unexpectedly at this remark. "Are we already talking about each other in the past tense?" he asked ruefully. "'I did,' 'you did,' 'you _were,_'" he continued along the same vein, the humour gone from his voice. "How _depressing_."

His observation—correct as it may have been—snuffed out whatever spark of life had been struck between them, and her eyes tightened.

_I don't want it to end like this._

She looked out the window into the night sky, full of blinking stars, and shivered in spite of the warm breeze that filtered through the bars from outside.

_I can't __**allow **__it to end like this._

"It doesn't have to be this way, Hans."

He sounded uninterested by the note of hopefulness in her voice.

"Maybe not for _you, _Elsa," he replied, "but for _me_ . . . yes, it does."

She frowned at his fatalism—since when did he start sounding like _her?_

"No," she said firmly, "not for _you_, either."

"Elsa . . ." he began, but she cut him off, her brow furrowed determinedly.

"I can get us **both **out of here," she said, leaning even closer to the floor. "I can use my powers—just like you said—and break us free."

She thought the suggestion would please him, especially since he had come up with it first; instead, she was surprised to find him as defeated as before.

"That's not possible, Elsa."

She frowned. "Why not? The guards are asleep, just as always; and I could get us far away from here long before they even knew what was happening."

In his cold silence, she felt her voice take on a kind of angry desperation.

"They wouldn't find us, Hans—didn't you say, before, that you _knew _they would never find me?" She was babbling now, but she didn't care. "Don't you still think that's true?"

He finally spoke again. "I do," he acknowledged, but in as reluctant a tone as possible.

She pressed her bare hands against the grate, as if the action would somehow make him understand the urgency of the situation.

"Then why don't you come with me?" she countered, nearly growling with frustration. "Don't you see how little time we have left before they kill us _both_?"

"_Elsa_ . . ."

He was warning her—trying to tell her to keep her voice down, since one of the guards had briefly stirred outside.

She found it impossible, her heart impatient with his slow, inadequate replies.

"_Please, _Hans," she practically pleaded, "just **trust **me."

He sighed—_and_ _oh, how she hated those sighs!_—and spoke her name again in that weary, beaten way.

"Elsa, I—I just **can't**."

He was hiding something from her. She could smell the stink of it from a mile away, and it seemed even more offensive to her than the pile of mouldy meat sitting in the corner of her cell had been.

"**Why?" **she demanded.

His answer was slow to arrive, but eventually, it did.

"Because I deserve this," he said hollowly. "I deserve **all **of this."

She stared at the grate in bemusement, her teeth gritting together.

_I don't understand him . . . I don't understand him at __**all**__._

"What are you saying, Hans?" she asked, rubbing her temple agitatedly. "How do you—how could you _deserve _to die like this?"

When he didn't respond straightaway, she sat up straight as an arrow, incensed by everything about him: his clever quips, his brooding silence, his sudden despondency, his continued rejection of her proposal to break out of the prison together.

_He's __**infuriating**__._

She gripped the bars on the grate, and her fingers turned white.

"For Heaven's sake, Hans," she fumed, "what could _possibly _make you want to—"

**"I let her die."**

She blinked, confused.

_What is he talking about?_

"I let Anna die, Elsa."

She frowned uncomprehendingly.

_What is he __**talking **__about?_

His voice cracked slightly. "That day—when she came back to the castle, freezing—she told me that she needed an 'act of true love' to save her," he said, and swallowed. "A true love's kiss, I suppose."

His tone was curiously pained as he continued.

"But I didn't give it to her. I just . . . left her there. To **die**."

_Oh, Elsa. You really don't know, do you?_

She couldn't control the ice that flowed from her fingertips, coating the grate, and her mouth hung open.

_I feel so __**thirsty**__._

"Why?"

He paused; perhaps he was surprised that she had spoken.

"Because I wanted to take the throne for myself," he continued, and sounded as parched as she felt. "I never would have had a chance to rule, otherwise."

A memory flitted through her mind—_you have __**twelve **__older brothers?_—but it left just as quickly.

All she could think about was how badly she wanted a drink of fresh, _clean_ water.

"I tried to kill you, too, after you escaped from the prison," he admitted, and she wondered if there was remorse in his voice—or if she was hearing him at all anymore. "But I didn—I **couldn't **bring myself to do it."

She stared blankly at the wall; trails of ice were creeping up it.

_My mouth is just so . . . __**dry**__._

"Why?" she asked again, automatically; in a way, she wasn't fully aware that she had even spoken.

"That's—" He paused. "I just couldn't."

_Water. Ice. __**Something**__._

Her eyes clouded over, not noticing that the floor beneath her was becoming frozen solid.

"That time I saw you up there, on the North Mountain, I—" he trailed off. "I thought you were terribly beautiful." He sounded tired, resigned. "It would have been a crime, to kill something so beautiful."

Her blood ran cold.

_Anna was beautiful, too._

"I guess I—yes, I think I must have—I fell in love with you that day, though I didn't realize it until later." His teeth chattered a little from the cold seeping through the grate. "And I wanted to keep you here, close to me—without having to share you with anyone else."

She felt nothing—a kind of dead, black void inside—and yet, the ice continued creeping, up, up, _up_.

"Now you know why I can't leave this place with you, Elsa," he finished. "I'll pay with my life tomorrow for all the things I've done to you—though that's hardly payment enough."

Icicles grew on the ceiling, sharp as knives at the ends.

_Thirsty . . . I'm so __**thirsty**__._

"You remember what they told us this morning? About the execution?"

She didn't reply.

"They'll keep you here to wait your turn while I'm up there, on the scaffolding," he reminded her. "But before they hang me—before the rope snaps my neck—you **have **to go."

He swallowed thickly again; the sound made her head _throb_.

"Don't look back, or forward, or to the side—just **go**."


	12. Part XII

"_I love you, Elsa."_

Her gaze was dull—muddy, even.

_I think he said something like that._

He was standing there, on the scaffold, and his face was already as white as death.

_I don't know that man, do I?_

Her expression was impassive as her hands swayed slightly, and the newly-bolted shackles around them jangled noisily.

_Maybe I did, once._

"**Prince Hans of the Southern Isles, you are hereby sentenced to death by hanging for your numerous crimes against . . ."**

The words faded away until she only saw lips struggling to form words in the bitter cold, a harsh gale sweeping across the pavilion.

_Was he a good man?_

Her eyes shifted back to the condemned prisoner, but they held no judgment of him—no anger, nor fear, nor hatred.

"**Do you have any last words?"**

Something flickered in her eyes, for a moment; soon, it was gone again.

_I don't know._

It was hard to see him from so far away, and hard to hear what was going on above the jeers of the crowd below.

But when he spoke—when he spoke, she heard him.

"**Good people of Arendelle," **he began, **"I am sorry I deceived you, and that I betrayed your trust. Before I die, however, I would like to make this one, last confession." **

He paused for a moment; curious to hear what he would say, the crowd quieted as well.

"**It was not Queen Elsa who killed the Princess Anna with her powers, but I; knowing of a way to save her, I chose to let the Princess die, and told the Queen it was her doing in order to imprison her and take the throne for myself."**

His eyes shone brilliantly in that moment—two bright, effervescent emeralds against a grey sky.

"**Do not allow these men to take the life of your queen, good people of Arendelle, when the fault is mine!" **he urged them, gesturing to the executioners. **"Free your rightful ruler and live in pea—"**

She watched as the executioner roughly shoved a black hood over his head, muffling his last words to the protests of the crowd, which now crowed with confusion at the proceedings.

Some colour slowly returned to her eyes, and she felt her hands tense in the armoured gloves secured around them.

_This man said he loved me once, didn't he?_

The guards pushed the crowd back from climbing the scaffolding, and the Duke of Weselton frantically signalled to the executioner to get it over and done with before things were out of their control.

He simply stood there all the while—not thrashing, nor kicking, nor even moving a single muscle in complaint—and the rope slid easily around his neck.

She thought she heard the Duke hiss _"Do it now!" _to the executioner; but she didn't know for sure, since her eyes had never left the black mask with the noose tied around its base.

_They hid his face from me._

The crowd cried with impotent rage, unable to beat back the guards—or, perhaps, they were too afflicted by the sudden cold which struck the square to do so.

He was standing above the trap door; she wondered if she was imagining it, or if she could see shallow breaths through the black emptiness of the hood.

_He won't say it, now._

She heard it, then—a sudden, wrenching noise accompanying the pull of a lever and a door crashing open—and, following that, a thick rope pulling taut.

His legs twitched, and the crowd shrieked, but she couldn't hear them at all.

_I can't see him._

Finally, they stopped moving.

Her hands moved up until they reached the window, and there, her fingers curled around its slim bars.

Her ghostly eyes peered out at the faceless man, and her grip suddenly tightened.

_He __**can't**__ say it, now._

Her cheeks felt wet; then, she felt nothing.

_He can't __**ever**__ say it again._

The gloves turned into ice around her small hands, and their shaking caused the metal to crack and fall away to the floor. Trickles of snow fell from her eyes, covering her chest in a light film.

Her lip trembled.

_They hid his face from me._

The bars froze and dissolved in her hands, then the chains around her wrists and feet, and finally all the meagre furnishings within the cell.

_What did he look like, when the rope snapped his neck?_

A guard was coming for her—or maybe two, or ten—but her eyes were fixed on the scaffold, on his limp body, on the executioner dragging it off before the crowds could overwhelm the platform.

_What was he going to say before they put the hood over him?_

She was full of so many questions; she was full of anger, of fear, of hatred, of—

"**What in the **_**hell **_**do you think you're doing, inma—"**

The guard's howling cut off just as soon as it had started, silenced by an impenetrable wall of ice behind her.

She hadn't turned around.

_Was he going to say that he—_

Blissful silence, and then . . . a memory.

"_I love you, Elsa."_

The ice shattered, and she staggered forward against the open window.

_I know that man._

She gripped the wall, and it froze at her touch. Her tears hit the ground as spitting drops of sleet.

_I __**loved **__that man._

The wall burst open, and a bitter storm descended upon the square, the rivers, the ocean, coating it all in a layer of impenetrable ice.

The wind came suddenly then, carrying her back to the mountains, but she couldn't see anything anymore; the world was endless, and it was as white as death.

Her eyes were clearer than daylight.

_I loved him._


End file.
